How to Evaluate a Watercolor Tutorial Book

Not everyone likes tutorial books, but I do. When I was starting out, step-by-step tutorials helped me understand the basics of how to put together a painting: how to get from blank page to scene. Although I’m now more likely to paint one of my own photos, I occasionally still do tutorials just for a relaxing and low-stress activity: I get to paint without making decisions.

I’ve discovered that I prefer books to videos because they let me go at my own pace, whether that’s slower than the video because I’m trying to understand a new concept, or faster because my paper’s drying.

Having worked my fair share of tutorial books, I can now judge how fun or useful they’re likely to be before investing time in a single tutorial. Here’s how you can, too.

Green Flags

You like the art style

The specifics are going to vary from person to person, but the best indicator that a tutorial book will be inspirational to you is how much you like the art style and how motivated you are to replicate it. If you don’t like the paintings, you won’t enjoy doing the tutorials. If you do like the paintings, you may be able to get a lot out of the tutorials even if they are written badly.

It is aimed at beginners

Beginners are the audience for step-by-step tutorials. More advanced painters who already know the basics of how to get from concept to painting tend to prefer to paint their own ideas in their own style.

A good tutorial book, then, is truly usable by a beginner. It doesn’t assume you already know anything, or that you already have lots of skills, experience, or supplies.

Basic things are explained, such as:

• What materials you need
• How to hold a brush and make different types of brush marks
• The difference between wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry (and when to use which technique)
• What brushes and paints to use at each point in the tutorial, and how to mix the colors you need

Supplies list is specific enough to shop from

As you are presumably a beginner, a good tutorial book will have a clear and detailed list upfront of all the supplies you need to follow along: paper, brushes, paint, and other accessories. It shouldn’t be assumed that you already have what you need, know what you need, or have pre-existing knowledge or preferences.

I consider it a green flag when the author specifies details such as:

• Paint: Brand name and color name or pigment number
• Brushes: Shape, size, and type of fiber (synthetic, sable, squirrel)
• Paper: Cold or hot press, weight, and material (cotton or cellulose)

This helps you to get exactly what the teacher uses, if it’s within your budget to do so, and also gives you a basis for determining the suitability of supplies you may already have.

Tutorials take multiple pages and show photos of every step

The best tutorials take things slow. There should be a photo of how the painting looks at each layer, and a minimum number of changes should be made on each layer, so that you can easily follow along. Each step should seem doable.

Tutorials are arranged from simple to complex

Many tutorial books are arranged in some other way (e.g. by theme or topic), but I strongly prefer tutorial books that start with the easiest tutorial and work their way to more complex ones. This lets you work the book in order and level up your skills along the way, with later tutorials building on the skills taught in earlier ones.

The most obvious place to begin is at the beginning, and if the first tutorial is too hard, the reader will be turned off. I don’t think it should be the reader’s responsibility to judge the difficulty of each tutorial and choose which one(s) are right for them at any given time: that is a teacher’s job, or in the case of a book, the author’s.

Exercises help you to practice skills before putting them to work in a tutorial

Every tutorial book I have seen divides information into “Skills” and “Projects.” “Skills” section(s) explain how to do something specific – say, paint a gradient – while “Projects” are step-by-step tutorials that put multiple skills together to paint a scene.

I like it when the “Skills” isn’t just an infodump, but includes mini-tutorials or associated exercises. A person reading a tutorial book is a person who likes to learn by doing, after all.

Bonus: Skills and projects are interspersed

This is not only uncommon but I feel like mostly unheard of, so I’ve made it a bonus.

A typical arrangement is for the book to be divided into two sections: first all the “Skills”, which are presented in lecture-style prose, with the rest of the book devoted to step-by-step “Projects.” This is such a common arrangement that I don’t dock points for it, but I do think it’s not the most effective.

I’d prefer to see “Skills” interspersed amongst the “Projects”, with each project reinforcing one or more recently-learned new skills. In my opinion, the structure of the book should be designed to let you work your way through the book in order, while also learning bite-sized amounts of information at a time, and continuously reinforcing your learning with simple exercises and more complex projects.

Again, I’ve never actually seen this done well. This alternating skills-and-projects arrangement is more common in a live or video class than in a book. And books that do intersperse learning with tutorials tend to give the tutorials short shrift.

Bonus: Variations are demonstrated

This is also a bonus green flag, because I’ve only ever seen it in one book, but I love to see variations on the tutorial, e.g. color swaps, rearranged elements, superficial changes such as adding or removing birds or clouds in the sky. Concrete examples are much more inspirational than simply being told to make it your own.

Red Flags

Supplies list is inaccurate or too vague

A lot can go wrong with the supplies list, and it’s usually at the beginning of the book, so it’s a good place to check for attention to detail.

Is the supplies list absent, or too vague to shop from? Some authors insist that the brands, colors, sizes, and so on don’t really matter and encourage you to use whatever supplies you prefer. The problem is that they do matter and beginners will not get the same results with different/worse supplies. Also, beginners don’t have any preferences yet, and they need to start somewhere. A more advanced student who does have strong preferences will ignore the supplies list anyway.

Is it specific, but in a way that’s still confusing? The most common culprit is naming multiple brands and products, but not which product comes from which brand. For example, “The paint brands I prefer are Daniel Smith, Winsor and Newton, and Schmincke, and the colors I use are Permanent Alizarin Crimson, Cobalt Blue, Indian Yellow, and Burnt Sienna.” Okay, but all of those brands have all of those color names and they’re different from each other, so which one comes from where?? You shouldn’t have to be a True Pigment Detective like me and have to use clues such as, “Ah, they said ‘Quinacridone Rose,’ that probably means Daniel Smith because Winsor calls it ‘Permanent Rose.’”

Is it accurate? Are the supplies in the supplies list actually the ones used in the tutorials? This is easiest to check with paint colors, since many tutorials often list the colors used in the project at the beginning of the chapter. Cross-check the supply list at the beginning with the paints used in each chapter. If you did go shopping from the list at the beginning of the book, would you actually have the supplies you need to complete the project, or does the author spring more stuff on you as the book goes on? Or are there even items that you are told to buy that you never end up using? This process admittedly requires a little bit of note-taking, but it’s easy enough that if the author hasn’t bothered to do it, I have severely reduced confidence in the care and attention they are willing to devote to my learning.

Tutorials have missing steps

The cliche of “how to draw” advice is that it’s usually in the form:

1. Draw a circle
2. Draw the rest

Painting tutorials have the same problem accelerated, because they often skip steps in the undersketch and in the painting. Sometimes the entire fucking owl is done before step 1, because it’s “just” the undersketch. If the book isn’t interested in teaching you to sketch, they should provide tracing pages. (Personally I hate tracing pages, so they’d be a red flag for me, but some people love ’em. Know thyself and look for tracing pages; whether you like ’em or hate ’em, it’s good to know if they’re there.)

Entire tutorials are crammed into a two-page spread

I’ve seen a lot of books try to cram a tutorial for an entire painting onto a two-page spread, and it simply doesn’t work. The photos are too small, and the painting isn’t broken down into enough steps.

Tutorials are few and far between

If you are going to work from a tutorial book, it’s my experience that you should choose a book that is all or mostly tutorials. Books that are mostly composed of other elements (e.g. chiefly prose and diagrams), with a tutorial every few chapters or so almost as an afterthought, never have good tutorials.

The book is about developing your own style

I think both tutorials and books about finding your own style are useful, but I think they are fundamentally different books.

When a major idea of the book is about finding your own style or voice, the presence of tutorials feels very jarring. I have actually found this contradiction surprisingly common. My guess is that this happens because the author turns in a manuscript and the editor or publisher says “We need to add tutorials so this will sell.”

Again, I think this goes back to confusion about the experience level of the audience and the purpose of different teaching tools. Tutorials are useful for beginners, who need to know the how-to before they can think about developing their own ideas. Books about figuring out your own style are great for intermediates, but tutorials won’t help them with this quest.

Tutorial Books I Recommend

Acknowledging that I am limited to only recommending those books where I like the art style, here are some of my favorite tutorial books that I find to be mostly green flags. If you want to buy any of these books, you can support the blog by using my links, which are affiliate links to Amazon.

Do you have any recommended tutorial books? Let me know!