Acrylic Painting: A Step-By-Step Instruction Book

Professionals tend to use no more than a dozen of the ACRYLIC PAINTING colors. Watercolor paper's slightly rough texture brings out the precisely fluid color of drybrushing a green pepper and the scrubby back-and-forth strokes of scumbling a peach. An Old Master technique monochromes lights and shadows before color glazing a kettle. The trick to painting glass or water is using the same mixtures as the background for patches of light and dark, but with more white for lights and middle tones. These are some of the tips that Wendon Blake shares as he follows artist Rudy De Reyna's demonstration paintings through covering shapes with flat tones, modeling lights and darks, and adding highlights, textures and details. The author also covers special techniques, such as cloth dabbing; correcting by darkening, lightening or repainting; impasto; paper crumpling; scratching; spattering; and sponging. He says good painting means working with cleanly stored supplies; chemically stable colors on acrylic gesso-coated hardboard, chemically pure 100% rag stock watercolor paper, or real artist's canvas; and museum-quality mat boards for taping with glue-coated cloths or homemade drawing paper strips with white water soluble paste. He has covered just about everything needed for going on to Earl Grenville Killeen's THE NORTH LIGHT BOOK OF ACRYLIC PAINTING TECHNIQUES, Barclay Sheaks' THE ACRYLICS BOOK, and Rachel Rubin Wolfe's THE ACRYLIC PAINTER'S BOOK OF STYLES AND TECHNIQUES.