Click Here To Purchase From Amazon Step-By-Step Art School: Acrylics

Author: Wendy Clouse

Published by Hamyln, a division of Octopus Publishing Group

ISBN: 0 600 61407 7  

“Step-By-Step Art School: Acrylics” is a solid introduction to acrylic painting for the serious – or seriously aspiring – artist.  As a beginning collage artist interested in the possibilities of mixed media work, I found the well-illustrated beginning chapters especially helpful.

Even the initial chapters of this book proceed well beyond the basics (as I previously understood them) and yet the text remains completely understandable throughout.  For instance, chapter three, “Looking at Hue,” suggests that the reader purchase no more than nine basic tubes of paint, creating a basic “pallatte” of colors in order to make subtly coordinating hues.  The chapter then goes on to explain and illustrate the color “spectrum” and the concept of “complimentary colors” in very understandable terms.

However, the beginner might stop reading Clouse’s book at the point where the aspiring art student will probably eagerly continue; that is, chapters five through nine, which delineate the steps necessary to create very interesting works of art.  These chapters are written with the assumption that the reader has the basic ability to draw – in other words,  it’s not an “Idiot’s Guide.”  As this reviewer’s representational skills are somewhat elementary,  the information found here seemed at first rather overwhelming.  But upon a second read-through, it became quite clear that this is certainly a “step-by-step” manual and that anyone with a mild-to-moderate dose of painterly ambition will be able to successfully follow the precise and well-illustrated directions to create many different styles of art with acrylic paints.

This is an extremely informative and well-written book.

The above review has been contributed by: Kathryn Atwood: Click Here To View More of Kathryn's   Reviews:

Kathryn Atwood's poetry, reviews and essays have appeared in numerous online and print journals, including "The Aurora Review,", "Afterimage," "Void Magazine," "Wild Violet," and "PopMatters."  When she's not writing or driving her three kids around somewhere, she's usually teaching at a local music studio or givng vocal performances with her husband on the  subject of American song.