Rating: WARTY!
This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
This was the second of two art books reviewed today that I cannot commend. Usually, I enjoy art and crafts books and find them useful and educational, and far more often than not, review them positively because of this, but this one felt like it was uninterested in talking about art, and far more into rambling on about astrology and seasonal Moons. I didn't feel like the book title represented what was going on here, and I was not impressed at all by what was going on.
The astrology treatise occupied over a dozen pages, followed by a short tutorial on actual painting. After that, it went on a jag about the new Moons which ate up another dozen pages without imparting a word about painting technique until, again, a short tutorial appeared at the end of that.
The book did offer some basic introductory information about watercolors, paints, papers, some techniques, and so on, as you would expect from a book of this nature, but after that it really wasn't much help at all. All of those pages passed by filled mostly with a bunch of folklore and fairytales that had nothing to do with painting.
The ebook version I had was annoyingly 'sticky' in the sense that certain pages (not always the same page) brought the book to a screeching halt and no matter how many times I tried to swipe, the page wouldn't change backwards or forwards for about twenty seconds, and then suddenly it changed. I couldn't even tap on it to bring up the slide bar at the bottom of the screen to change pages that way, so I was literally stuck on that page until something clicked internally in the iPad or the app and it swiped.
It was really annoying. I tried this in both Bluefire Reader and in Adobe Digital Editions and had the same problem in both apps, so unlike a print book, the ebook will not allow you to quickly page through to find a specific page. Overall, I felt - or rather I would have, had I paid for this rather than been able to see it as an advance review copy - that there was very little value for money to be had here! I cannot commend this one.
