Customer Reviews

Oil Painting Techniques: Learn How to Create Dynamic Textures with the Versatile Painting Knife (Artist's Library Series, AL23)

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I have mixed feelings on this book. On one hand it's small and very to the point, with lots of color photographs which explain things better than lots of words. On the other I think there is not enough coverage of the knife techniques and too much coverage of the demonstrations. For example there are no exercises for practicing the knife techniques, which is something I got out of another book "Learn to Paint With a Knife" that I found extremely helpful. The hardest part of learning to paint with a knife for me was to put down paint over wet paint. This book dedicates just a few sentances on the subject, which were not enough to help me at all. More than half the book is demonstrations, like "this is how to paint a rock" "this is how to paint a cloud" etc. I am sure it's good pratice to learn how to paint these but I feel it's a cookie-cutter approach and when the reader wants to paint something else, like a building or a still life for example he will be lost. Why do these books always use a mountain for the big demo at the end? In the end it just seemed a little too much like Bob Ross for me. Search google for the author and if you want to paint like him (he does very nice work, just not my style) then this book is for you. If not, I still recommend this book for the color photos and because it's not expensive.

Walter Foster books are the "Readers' Digest" of painting instruction which is both a strength and a weakness; a weakness because of the brevity of material and a strength for the very same reason. While each volume in the "Artist Library Series" is only about 50 to 60 pages they tend to offer the beginning painter more of what they need than do the more erudite offerings from Watson-Guptill or North Light.

Each Walter Foster volume is authored by a working artist and offers technique relative to the specific title, a section on materials and a series of "lessons" in the form of demonstrations, which is the meat of each book. The books are credited as being for "beginning/intermediate" painters, but realistically they're really for beginners that have learned how to mix colors on their palette and have mastered the basics of applying paint to the support surface. What these students or aspiring painters need most is to paint simple projects repeatedly to acquire both competence and confidence; not have argumentative and conflicting information about what brand of oil paint is the "best" or whether one should always under-paint in values or line..... or the worst of all; why you must have a specific color on your palette. All of this nonsense is what makes up the bulk of way too many oil painting instruction books and, in my opinion, serves no good purpose for anyone still learning the craft.

This particular volume by William F. Powell is devoted to painting knife techniques, has a significant number of demonstrations in creating landscape elements and ends with 4 demos utilizing those techniques. It's not an exhaustion of the subject (no Walter Foster book is) but it does allow the reader/painter to develop skills with a variety of knives and I suspect each painter will come out the other end of this book feeling like they really learned how to do something, instead of just knowing more about what they don't know. I'd also recommend getting a copy of Bill Creevy's "The Oil Painting Book" which is dated but does have a section on palette knife technique. This is a style of painting that isn't well covered in the literature and while this book may not be all inclusive it at least provides a credible review of the specialty and offers the student painter a lot of options to explore more on their own.

For a brief background on Walter Foster see my review of Plein Air Painting in Oil (Artist's Library Series), a companion to this book.

This book contains great information for the new artist. Painting with the knife was totally foreign to me until I read this book.

This is a great book for beginners(especially painting knives), the textures it presents are used in a lot of paintings. The book has very good examples of rocks, mountains, and water all things that need to have a textural component that can be difficult to achieve with knife painting. I prefer knife painting and this book has been a great resource to me.

Although this is a small book it is packed with how-to's with a palette knife and includes color mixes

A good clean copy, almost like new. His instruction is clear and to the point, he doesn't get emotional about it or have cute names for his knives. Painting tends to be a learn by doing and palette knife painting seems to be especially so. Maybe that's why there aren't very many books about it, it's just something you learn by doing it. Having said that this is a very good book and gets you right into the practical application of the craft.

I was given a very good recommendation to this book, and found it to be quite a valuable resource, showing how to create textures and the many different applications of oil medium. Powell shows many Painting knives techniques.
It's a great book for those new to and exploring painting knives.