Customer Reviews

Acrylic Workbook: A Complete Course in Ten Lessons

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is the best book on beginning acrylic painting that I have run across so far. I've found the exercises challenging but not too difficult. The 10 lessons seem to give the beginner a good grounding in basic concepts of color selection, composition, building the painting, and special techniques. I would highly recommend this book to someone who is interested to beginning to paint but does not have time to take lessons.

This was one of the first books I bought when I just started acrylic painting.

This book introduces the reader to different brushes, textures, effects,etc.

I actually did many of the exercises from this book and they came out pretty good. I enjoyed doing the exercises because a lot of the exercises were easy and precision wasn't really required, which let me just work on the basics of things (shadows,etc.)

I definately wouldn't call this a complete course, but it might be a complete course of the basics of acrylic painting (to get you started). I would recommend this book if you're just starting acrylic painting and want a book that's fairly easy to do the exercises for.

Please don't name your book a complete course in 10 lessons if it is not. Only for beginners and remember not a complete course. Only if you don't know anything about painting, it gives very basic knowlege and it should say that is what it does.

I ordered this book through a magazine thinking it would have good step by step instructions. Thank goodness I didn't pay much for it. The acrylic exersizes are all done in a messy watercolor-like style. It looks like something my 2 year old could do. I gave my copy to the goodwill (that was before I discovered reselling online...of course, I wouldn't wish this book on anyone).

If a 125-page book on painting, no matter what the medium, claims to be complete, the claim has to be taken with a very large grain of salt. "Completeness" aside, this enjoyable intro gives the beginner plenty to work with, minus the dry didactics an impatient reader would skip anyway.

I have the spiral-bound edition, which I recommend. It's built to sit flat, so the budding artist can refer to it easily even with hands full of paints, brushes, and whatnot. The text follows a logical progression, starting with paints, brushes, palettes, and knives. It addresses some of the many acrylic media available, with the special working properties that each imparts. Color mixing and layering comes early on, but can't be called a strong section - it's a complex topic, and the many different ways to understand color just can't fit the space allocated.

Successive sections cover basic ways to define an image, develop a composition, and create structure. These, of course, are the most complex topics and the ones least teachable from books. The ideal reader, I imagine, is in a rush to get going and has little patience with lengthy, complex discussions. The right reader gets off to a running start, even if others run off the end of the material in a hurry. No approach suits every artist - if you lack a real mentor but still want to have a little easel-painting fun with acrylics, here's a great place to start. It doesn't cover fabric painting, lift techniques, airbrushing, or lots of other parts of the acrylic range, but does a very nice job within the range it addresses.

-- wiredweird

The paintings in here are ugly, I can't imagine what you would do with all 10 lesson paintings once you were finished. However, the actual lesson is good! There are step-by-step instructions and photos. I feel this is best for a beginner who hasn't taken any classes.