Acrylic Secrets

Learn the secrets of painting with acrylics from a lifelong master.

An artist-to-artist guide to acrylics today! Acrylics are an astoundingly versatile medium, as evidenced by the diversity of work emerging from studios around the country. This book takes you inside the studios and creative minds of 9 of today's top acrylic artists as they share favorite techniques, distinctive approaches, and examples of their best work. Packed with expert advice, Inside Acrylics will help beginning and intermediate artists make the most of both traditional acrylics and their new, slow-drying cousins. • Real-world advice from 9 top acrylic artists, from the way they organize their palettes to tried and true strategies for painting in the studio, painting portraits, and painting outdoors. • 18 step-by-step demonstrations of favorite techniques. • How to use acrylic paints, gels and mediums to achieve the look of oil paints, innovations in mixed media, and effects not achievable with any other medium. • Advice on everything from materials and color theory to varnishing and care of finished work. Inside Acrylics contains years of hands-on experience to help up-and-coming artists make sense of all the options, save trial-and-error time, and explore the exciting possibilities of this most remarkable medium.

Award-winning illustrator and painter Marjorie Sarnat presents an outstanding refresher course in creative thinking, suitable for artists of every level. In this guide, she shares the tips and techniques she's discovered in the course of her personal experiences and explorations. These 300 quick, easily grasped text passages detail methods for adding inspiration and innovation to your creative process. The new, hands-on approaches to materials, painting surfaces, and texture applications can help you find a fresh angle for your style or break through a creative block. Every "secret" in this book is expressed in practical terms geared toward boosting your artistic abilities. From sharpening your drawing skills and applying media in unique ways to creating intriguing visual illusions and refining your choices of color and composition, this guide is loaded with advice and fresh ideas. You'll also find cost-saving ways to obtain and manage your art tools and supplies as well as scores of ideas for making art with creative kids.

Let Jerry Yarnell teach you how to paint acrylic landscapes! You can master landscape painting with the help of popular painter Jerry Yarnell. Jerry starts by exploring different areas of landscape painting that often create problems for beginning and intermediate artists. He'll walk you through individual studies, so you can practice and explore new techniques without worrying about ruining a complete painting, then he'll show you how to apply those techniques to create finished works of art. Learn how to: • Work with the right materials • Master all essential techniques • Choose, mix and apply color

Rich colors, elaborate textures, and expressive brush strokes make painting with acrylics an adventure. This introduction to acrylics gives beginning artists the fundamentals they will need to master this lively art form. Creative projects teach artists important skills while they make masterpieces of their own. Step-by-step instructions with accompanying full-color photographs make each project accessible. With a stunning design and simple instructions, this book is the perfect introduction to acrylics.

The best acrylic artists competition showcase! Color has the power to demand attention, quicken the heart and transport us to another place and time. The virtuosos featured in AcrylicWorks 4 have successfully employed acrylic paint to capture and use that power to magnificent effect. This brilliant collection features 127 paintings from modern-day acrylic artists. The artists themselves reveal acrylic painting ideas, tips and secrets, sharing how they play colors against each other--light and dark, bright and soft, delicate glazes and bold impasto--to make their paintings sing. They share secrets for creating mood, capturing a subject's personality and conveying the spirit of an animal in the wild. And how they approach subjects ranging from a shock of sunset sky, to the liquid ripples of antique glass, to purely abstract color play. It's the kind of collection that reminds artists why they paint and gives art lovers a real appreciation for the breathtaking possibilities of this most versatile medium. "Color is the very soul and spirit of a painting." --Diana Lee, p75

After auctioneer Lisa Spencer's adventures in "Cabbagetown" (Murder in Cabbagetown), she is ready for things to get back to normal. Unfortunately, that also means that business is back to being slow, and the auction scene just isn't what it used to be. With a sale just around the corner, Lisa is still looking for a headliner of the show to attract the highest bidders, and she may just have solved that problem. She's found a painting by a renowned Austrian artist, Gustav Klimt, and she's on her way to meet the owner in a small town just east of Toronto. She couldn't possibly know that waiting for her is another adventure, this time involving some shady characters, a big wig research association, and even a painter with ties to a WWIIPOW camp. And, as if THAT wasn't complicated enough, Lisa soon finds herself entangled in yet another murder. At the end of it all, will Lisa finally get her hands on the painting to auction? Business might be slow, but for Lisa Spencer, everything else is anything but...