This is the year of Emma Lefebvre! Hot on the heels of her Craftamo subscription box launch, Emma Lefebvre released her very first book this month and here is my review.
Table of Content
Watercolour Lessons covered a good variety of techniques and subjects. As a matter of fact, this book is geared toward beginners. Specifically, the first 66 pages provide all the useful information on supplies, basic brush strokes, colour theory and some special effects (e.g. salt). If you are on intermediate level like me, you might not need to read Part I, though it is still a very good refresher course.
Tutorials/Projects
Botanical Projects
When I first got into watercolour, Emma Lefebvre was one of the few artists I started watching on Youtube. She is known for her beautiful loose florals, which sparked my interest in watercolour painting, after years of drawing realistic portraits with coloured pencils. In fact, her loose florals are among the prettiest I have seen.
Emma Lefebvre is not only talented as an artist; she is also a great teacher. I feel that I have learned so much from her. I have watched her tutorials on youtube on how to do these loose florals, and I find that her book is just as good to learn from.
Landscape Projects
Since I painted from Watercolor for Relaxation, I don’t always tape my paintings to create a clean edge anymore. I did a quick one for Snowy Forest using Paul Rubens watercolour. By the way, I painted Snowy Forest a second time but still am not happy with the hard edges on the foreground snow. I have yet to perfect my skills but hopefully with practice I will get better!
In Sunset Field tutorial, I learned to splatter clean water to create the special out of focus effects. My paper wasn’t the best and buckled quite a bit, so I painted it again on the 100% cotton paper from Emma Lefebvre x Craftamo box. My splatters were a bit too big so the effect is very similar to salt, unlike Emma’s soft look.
Landscape is not my thing, clearly I have a lot to learn!
Food Project
I picked the cupcake project because I have always wanted to paint one! Emma Lefebvre gives very easy to follow instructions, so I had no trouble recreating her cupcake. I added a shadow on mine.
Animal Project
Since this is the year of the rabbit, I picked the rabbit project to paint from for the review of Emma Lefebvre’s book. It was not hard and it came out quite nice.
Tracing Pages
Even though the projects are very beginner friendly and comprised of simple shapes, Emma Lefebvre included tracing pages, which makes it easy for anyone to get started.
Emma Lefebvre Watercolour Lessons Book Review
This is a great book for beginners! It covers a good variety of subjects and is easy to understand. The projects are not difficult to do and will help you learn techniques to grow your skills. I enjoyed painting the projects from the book and I plan to do every single one.
In conclusion, I am happy to have this book in my collection.
