I am new to watercolors and Your Year in Art Watercolor is the perfect book to introduce and nurture my new artistic adventure. It also is a particularly welcome book in the age of Covid-19 and social isolation. This book tells you all about the paper and paint you need and then it’s off to a weekly assignment. I appreciate that the projects are varied both in content and location, such as outside. As the book progresses, the projects become more challenging and as a result, I believe it will hold my interest for the year as I work through it. Your Year in Art Watercolor is filled with eye candy and inspiration. The techniques are explained well and tips are given throughout the book. You won’t want for ideas with this book in hand.

Thank you to Quarto Publishing Group - Walter Foster and NetGalley for an advanced ready copy in exchange for my honest review.

This is a fabulously inspiring watercolor book which expertly guides you through a whole year's worth of activities to play, to create and to watercolor!
A must-have for anyone interested in creativity, making, painting, color and design!

This book is so beautiful and so easy to follow. It is a very user friendly book that allows us to be creative while also giving us a place to start. I can’t wait to see all my final products!

Your Year in Art: Watercolor is absolutely perfect if you’re completely new to watercolors or painting in general. Each week presents a new lesson along with tips and suggestions. From the beginning, you are encouraged to take it slow without getting too overwhelmed or intimidated. The graphics and photos are so beautiful and makes me want to dig out my watercolors.
Watercolor painting can be very intimidating, especially for any beginner. It is a less forgiving medium than acrylics, for instance. Your Year in Art: Watercolor presents the ins and outs of watercolor painting very thoroughly while giving the novice artist time to explore, create and learn on their own. All the projects seem so fun! I am very excited to try out the projects, especially watercolor cacti!

This book is a delight! I've been wanting to try my hand at watercolors for awhile, and this gives me a solid framework for learning it on my own. I like how it starts with basics and then you build your skills each week throughout the span of a year. I'd recommend this to anyone starting out with watercolors and plan on giving it as gifts to my creative friends.

Such a great beginners guide for watercolor. The week by week suggestions and techniques are easy to follow and great for expanding technique. I would highly recommend this for anyone interested in watercolor.

I am not a painter but I would love to be able to paint with the watercolor technique. I tried to look at different books but they didn't capture my attention and after browsing some of them I thought I would never to be able to do some watercolor paints. This one changed my mind. The instruction are clear, easy to follow and I think it would be the perfect book for a beginner like me. I think I am going to buy a copy of it and start doing the "weekly assignments'!
thanks to Quarto Publishing Group, and NetGalley for this ARC in change of an honest review.

I am a big fan of doing something regularly and creating a routine and habit around it. The hardest part of doing something daily/weekly is generating ideas. Coming up with a list of 52 things to do so you can keep learning, expanding and exploring takes time and energy that could otherwise be going into creating.

This book can help with exactly that. The colorful, beautiful, and inspiring drawings in this book come with a different focus/challenge each week, keeping you learning and exploring. Each week is fun in its own way and the variety and depth here is sure to keep you going. The ideas are simple but the art can apply to everyone from a beginner to an advanced artist.

with gratitude to netgalley and Walter Foster Publishing for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

As a new watercolor artist I have looked at a lot of books. I love this one for the clear inspirations and easy to understand tips. The prompts have enough variety to encourage skill growth and keep my interest. The example images are not to hard for a beginner like me but do get more challenging as the book progresses. I am looking forward to working my way through the book.

Your Year in Art: Watercolor by Kristin Van Leuven. I was excited to read this book as I have always been looking for a watercolor instructional book that would inspire me to finally pick up a brush and try watercoloring. The premise of the book is that there are 52 tasks, one for each week. In week one you learn a task. Week two builds on week one and adds more. Therefore you are building on your lessons. The author continually encourages the reader not to be too hard or critical of themselves and just go with the process.

The colors and projects in the book are awesome. Just paging through it made me happy. There is a lot of inspiration and excitement to be had when reading this book. There are tips and tricks to refer to in each week. I was pleased with the easy to follow step by step directions on basic watercolor techniques. Many other watercolor books seem intimidating and this one does not. I feel that a beginner, as well as, someone striving to improve their painting would benefit from this book. I would definitely recommend this book. Well done!

I would like to thank Quarto Group, the author and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I have recently got back into drawing and have been using watercolor to bring the pictures alive. I saw this book on NetGalley and I wanted it more to refresh my skills.'s a great little book with tons of hints and tips. I even forgot about using masking fluid. I haven't used that since college.



It also gives loads of assignments and most of all it helps when stuck in a rut. I highly recommend this book and it will be one for my bookshelf when it's out

Thank you for NetGalley for the free article.

Just like most art books it starts with an introduction listing the basic materials you'll need, then it moves into weekly exercises. From color theory to negative space the artist learns how to use watercolors. Once through the basics, the exercises turn to focusing on creativity and how to find inspiration and try new ideas. This is a great book for beginners, or artists who need a little push to get back into the creative habit. #netgalley #youryearinart

This is such a beautiful book - it would be a great gift!
As a beginner, I felt like it started off really helpfully on basic techniques, but then it jumped more to projects that while inspirational, I didn't feel like I had the skills to implement.
It's beautiful, and would be great to have a hard copy to flick through for reference.
Thanks to NetGalley for providing a digital review copy.

I received an advance reader copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review via netgalley and the publishers.

This is a beautiful art watercolour project book to give you many types of inspiration and ideas.

The book consists of 52 projects to try (one for each week of the year) and starts off with easy stuff such as mixing paints, layering, textures etc and builds up to more advanced projects over-the-counter weeks.

This book is a great project book for all art stages of watercolour painting, from newby ( like me) to more advanced and would make a beautiful present for watercolour lovers.

I have never been much of a watercolor painter, I never really got the right ratio of water to color and things would end up a runny mess.  I have seen some beautiful water colors though and I am always very jealous of those who can do it.  I was happy to read Your Year In Art: Watercolor which gives you all sorts of basics and techniques to get your started and then a project for each week of the year, getting more and more difficult as your skills advance!  I don't have any of the art supplies needed for these but there were quite a few weekly projects that caught my eye (you know one was that panda on the front cover!) so I may have to remedy this and give water color another try with the help of this book.

I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review, I was not otherwise compensated.

I’m a beginner at watercolor and find that this book slowly builds one’s confidence by focusing on different techniques and then projects.. Early on, that week might focus on brushstrokes, another on white space, another on the types of paper and how they affect appearance.

Later exercises provide suggestions on different projects: try your least favorite color, create your portrait, and paint a part of your room. The text provides lovely illustrations and examples, rather than give explicit directions for projects (like most YouTube videos). After reading through most of the text, I’m excited to carry out its directions and explore my own abilities and creativity!

This book really makes watercolour fun and invites anyone to chill out and have a go. The vibrant colourful pages are so inspiring and having a different project and technique for the week really encourages you to focus. The instructions are just enough to get your paint brush to the paper. It is the perfect book for a beginner wanting to try out different techniques and just have a go. Just browsing through the pages will have you reaching for your art supplies. I think this book will also appeal to none artists who journal or scrapbook and just want to add a bit of colour and design to their pages. I love this book.

This is a beautiful, comprehensive and thorough guide to painting different things in watercolours. I would recommend this for anyone who is wanting to use watercolours. This is an excellent art guide with lots of detail and it made me want to paint straight away!

This is a colorful, fun book that gives you a year of watercolor prompts and inspiration. The author starts with a bit of basics about watercolor painting and then provides an assignment a week for 52 weeks. You start small with things like color mixing and using shapes and move on to tasks like painting in black and white, using resists, painting your to do list, painting the sky, etc. Tips and pointers are provided throughout, and there are lots of the author's paintings for illustrations.

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for review.

I'm so in love with this book. It breaks down EVERYTHING YOU NEED to really learn watercolor from the basics up, and does it in weekly lessons so that you focus on one skill at a time. And it's easy to follow, which is not always the case in art books in general, but especially in watercolor it seems.