Product Description

Provides step-by-step instructions for beginning painters with exercises in painting flowers, trees, bricks, fur, and other simple subjects.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #237973 in Books
• Published on: 1996-08-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

From Library Journal
North Light's "First Step" series is designed for the absolute beginner. The first book in this series, Cathy Johnson's Sketching and Drawing (LJ 3/15/95), made the mistake of assuming that the neophyte is too paralyzed by fear to learn to draw a straight line. This work gives the student a little more credit while clearly introducing the versatile medium of acrylics. Lord's simple and effective features, like "Composition Dos and Don'ts," help make this an extremely well-done manual. Highly recommended; for more advanced students, see Earl Grenville and Leah Killeen's The North Light Book of Acrylic Painting Techniques (North Light, 1995).
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A "Must-Have"
If you can only purchase one book on acrylic painting, this is the one to have. The author covers every aspect of painting from landscape (trees, leaves, bushes, rocks, etc.) to portrait painting. She covers the types of brushes and how they are used. This book has everything I was looking for and more. There are some nice illustrations to follow. I'm so glad I purchased it!

More like 2nd or 3rd steps
This book like so many so-called beginner's acrylics books follows the usual pattern: a chapter on materials (this book's section is rather sketchy) and then an immediate huge jump into technique. Right after the sketchy materials section the author devotes a chapter on composition before getting into technique. The technique chapter is not very helpful; it shows you a catalog of the results of various techniques but provides no real help in how to achieve them. On the plus side the paintings shown (and there are lots of them) are appealing to me; however, I after reading the book I wouldn't have the slightest chance of even making a faint resemblance of them.

As my growing collection of unsatisfactory "beginner's" acrylics shows (the nearest big bookstore is almost three hours away) there is a huge difference between a gifted artist and a gifted art teacher, though in fairness what is probably lacking are gifted art instruction authors. When writing these books they apparently don't have any reader feedback (why not?) who could slow them down by asking questions like how do I thin the paint, how thing should it be, what's the best way to mix colors, how do I clean the brushes, how do I keep the paint from drying out on my palette or my painting, etc., etc., etc.

The only painting book I've found so far which can truly claim to be a beginner's book is Jack Reid's "Watercolor Basics: Let's Get Started". That book is full of exercise paintings that let the reader learn a technique on a simple painting; the paintings are simple enough so that the beginner doesn't get lost in the detail yet have some artistic character.

Not very satisfying
Not a lot of information in this book (i.e. 'tiny lines must be drawn with an inky or soupy like substance'. However the book does not tells you how to get this substance. Water, a medium or what and how much?).

Much book space has been spent on showing paintings.