Amazon.com Review
Do you know how to calculate how much paint you'll need for your dining room? Do you know when you should use paint pads instead of paintbrushes? Do you know what pattern you're supposed to follow when you use a roller to paint a ceiling? These and other basic steps are answered in
How to Paint: A Complete Guide to Painting Your Home. You will also learn the effects of your color choices. A long, narrow room, for example, can be made to appear wider by painting the short walls a darker color than the long walls. Appetites stir and conversation comes alive in a red dining room. Such knowledge is extremely helpful when it comes time to paint a nursery and you've decided whether your intention is to stimulate your child or create a quiet, restful place.
How to Paint also introduces the proper tools for the job and explains when to use short-, medium- and long-nap rollers. (Respectively--when applying glossy paints to smooth surfaces, when you want to give flat surfaces a light texture, and when you want to paint a surface that is already textured, such as stucco.) The main gripe about this book is the constant attempt at self-promotion. Must every gallon of paint and every brush pictured have the stamp of House Beautiful, the magazine that put out this book? Thankfully, there's no effort to recommend brand names in their section on picking materials, but it nonetheless makes you wonder about their objectivity. At times, the book is also a tad bit too simplistic. It tells you, for example, that you don't have to paint every room in your house the same color. It seems safe to assume that anyone who would bother to read a book on painting already knows that much. Still,
How to Paint makes good use of color photos and most of the observations are more reasonable than simplistic, making this a worthwhile book for the beginning painter.
--John Russell
