Sasbadi, RM19.90, ISBN 978-983-77-2476-1
Education, 2021

“Pendidikan seni visual” is visual arts education in Bahasa Melayu, while “seni halus” is fine arts. Therefore, Abu Sareh Haron’s Pendidikan Seni Visual SPM: Seni Halus is meant to be a reference guide for candidates taking Kertas 2, which is a 3-hour drawing and painting exam.

At least, that’s what I think this book is supposed to be.

Author

Abu Sareh Haron’s background and street cred are listed on the back cover. If there is one thing Sasbadi excels at, it’s to hype up the authors of their educational books, and Encik Abu’s cred is indeed impressive. He’s a teacher, Jurulatih Utama (a principal trainer of this subject), lecturer, as well as an artist.

Design and Content

This book can be divided into two sections.

The first section is about drawing and using pencils, coal, et cetera to create black and white artworks. The author uses his own works to showcase the art… except there is no explanation about his technique.

Yes, his art is fine, but… let me use an example. In the section about drawing humans, it wouldn’t hurt to tell candidates that the length of each of the upper and lower arm should be the same as the distance between the upper neck and waist when it comes to proportions of a human. That’s what Encik Abu did in the sketches but surely, he could have spared a line or two of explanation.

Likewise, he shows off how well he shades and creates textures with coal and color pencils by smudging the lines and all, but he never explains how he does it.

This is where a link to some videos that demonstrates step by step how the author does his thing would have been very useful, but sadly, there is no such thing here.

Of course, one can argue that candidates that cannot properly sketch and draw should seriously contemplate dropping the subject for another, but then again, why have a section devoted to drawing when there is no explanation to go along with the artworks. It feels a lot like the author is just showing off his skills here!

The second section, tackling examples of the SPM Kertas 2 questions as well as actual ones, is a bit more useful in that Encik Abu lists down the colors that he uses for each step of producing a certain artwork. However, again, some demonstration videos would have been great here.

Also, Encik Abu’s style is watercolors. Candidates preferring to use oil or poster or other forms of paints may not find much use for this section, aside from maybe getting some ideas from the author on the kind of things to draw for a certain theme and how to present those things.

Conclusion

• I’m not sure how useful this book is for candidates sitting for the exam, as the book seems to be more of a showcase of the author’s portfolio masquerading as some kind of reference book or guidebook.
• One won’t receive thorough advice on how to draw or paint here. However, I’d question why a candidate is sitting for this paper then if they lack necessary rudimentary skills such as drawing and painting! There are other subjects to choose from, surely.
• However, the artworks are lovely, and I actually wish this book had come in hardcover format—it could be a nice coffee table book to browse through now and then!