Painting Resources > Books

Acrylic Revolution: New Tricks & Techniques for Working With the World's Most Versatile Medium
Acrylic Revolution is your essential, all-in-one guide for acrylic painting techniques and more. It features over 101 ways to break through the boundaries of conventional painting and re-define the creative potential of this all-purpose medium. Every page provides insight on how to use acrylic paint in ways you never thought possible to create stunning visual effects and textures. Ten complete sections detail a range of empowering applications, including how to: * Prepare and paint on virtually any surface * Create textures of all kinds * Work with transfers, collage, resists and mixed media * Achieve innovative stenciling and line work * Customize your paint to adjust thickness, transparency and drying time * Simulate other mediums, such as oil, tempera or watercolor * Create faux finishes, magical effects, sheens and more

Classical Painting Atelier: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Studio Practice
Students of art hailed Classical Drawing Atelier, Juliette Aristides’s first book, as a dynamic return to the atelier educational model. Ateliers, popular in the nineteenth century, teach emerging artists by pairing them with a master artist over a period of years. The educational process begins as students copy masterworks, then gradually progress to painting as their skills develop. The many artists at every level who learned from Classical Drawing Atelier have been clamoring for more of this sophisticated approach to teaching and learning. In Classical Painting Atelier, Aristides, a leader in the atelier movement, takes students step-by-step through the finest works of Old Masters and today’s most respected realist artists to reveal the principles of creating full-color realist still lifes, portraits, and figure paintings. Rich in tradition, yet practical for today’s artists, Classical Painting Atelier is ideal for serious art students seeking a timeless visual education.

Facial Expressions: A Visual Reference for Artists
All artists are tired of persuading their nearest and dearest to look sad…look glad…look mad…madder…no, even madder…okay, hold it. For those artists (and their long-suffering friends), here is the best book ever. Facial Expressions includes more than 2,500 photographs of 50 faces—men and women of a variety of ages, shapes, sizes, and ethnicities—each demonstrating a wide range of emotions and shown from multiple angles. Who can use this book? Oh, only every artist on the planet, including art students, illustrators, fine artists, animators, storyboarders, and comic book artists. But wait, there’s more! Additional photos focus on people wearing hats and couples kissing, while illustrations show skull anatomy and facial musculature. Still not enough? How about a one-of-a-kind series of photos of lips pronouncing the phonemes used in human speech? Animators will swoon—and artists will show a range of facial expressions from happy to happiest to ecstatic.

Gustave Courbet
Nowadays it is difficult to conceive of the impact that Gustave Courbet's paintings made on French art of the mid-nineteenth century. At once casting himself as revolutionary, bohemian and peasant, Courbet (1819-1877) overturned a deeply-entrenched tradition of academic painting in France, and, eschewing the Romanticism of Delacroix and the NeoClassicism of Ingres, coined instead an idiom he named "Realism." Realism was not pretty, classically proportioned, or literary; rather, it confronted the conditions of rural working life, then an unimaginable subject for art. The first masterpiece of this new style was "Burial at Ornans" (1849-1850), a colossal anti-epic that depicted an ordinary funeral in Courbet's home town. The contrast between the work's scale and its subject matter was pronounced, and its murky earth tones struck critics as willfully ugly--a defining reaction that would recur throughout Modernism, particularly in the reception of early works by Manet and Picasso. Courbet's palette emphasized mass and body politically--that is, in a manner that affirmed the world itself rather than the transcendence of it. His equally famous "The Origin of the World" of 1866, which presented the female genitalia close-up, made this stance explicit. The conceptual beginnings of the "painting of modern life" are as much in Courbet's "Realism" as in Charles Baudelaire's famous essay of the same name.

Landscape Painting Inside and Out: Capture the Vitality of Outdoor Painting in Your Studio With Oils
Offers down-to-earth advice on painting gorgeous outdoors scenes through 10 step-by-step demos Teaches painters how to master the art of observation Shows readers how to translate field notes and sketches into fully realized studio paintings The overwhelming beauty of the outdoors is one of the most inspiring - and elusive - subjects for painters. With Landscape Painting Inside and Out, Kevin Macphearson first shows readers how to see like an artist, then teaches them how to recreate their vision into stunningly realistic outdoors scenes. His insightful process encourages readers to focus on the small details to achieve big results.

Oil Painter's Solution Book Landscapes: XX Answers to Your Oil Painting Questions
Spend less time reading and more time painting with award-winning artist and instructor Elizabeth Tolley as she answers over 100 of the most pressing questions artists have about painting landscapes in oil. The handy Q&A format covers everything from basic brush techniques to deciding what to paint first while on location. Learn how to: * Choose the right materials for you * Prepare indoor and outdoor workspaces * Design spectacular compositions * Select eye-catching color for visual impact * Paint with new brush strokes and techniques * Evaluate your own work

Oil Painting Secrets from a Master: 25th Anniversary Edition

The Oil Painting Course You've Always Wanted: Guided Lessons for Beginners and Experienced Artists
Did you ever wish you could go to a really good art school and learn how to paint in oil? Or perhaps you have painted for years and are still struggling with color mixing and wish you could find a good teacher to help. In the Oil Painting Course You’ve Always Wanted, author Kathleen Staiger gives you a complete painting course you can take at home. Crystal clear, step-by-step lessons build from learning about light and shadow, brush control, and foolproof color mixing, to still life painting, landscapes, and portraits—every topic is covered in clear text, diagrams, illustrations, and demonstrations, with guided projects in every lesson. Tips and extra help sections appear throughout the book to help with common problems. Staiger has taught oil painting for more than thirty-five years; many of her students are now exhibiting and selling their paintings. Every painter from beginning hobby painters to BFA graduates has questions. Here atlast are the answers!

The Painter in Oil
This four-part treatment encompasses materials, general principles, technical principles, and practical applications. Topics include canvases, easels, brushes, paints, and other tools; attitudes and originality; drawing, perspective, light and shade, composition, and color; and sketching, still lifes, flowers, portraits, landscapes, and figures. 64 illustrations enhance this informative manual.

Traditional Oil Painting: Advanced Techniques and Concepts from the Renaissance to the Present
As more and more artists today look to the past, there has been a tremendous resurgence of interest in painting realistically--in creating convincing illusions of three-dimensional depth on two dimensional surfaces. How did the Old Masters create their masterpieces? What kind of education allowed these great artists to create such beautiful work, and how can an artist learn these lessons today? Traditional Oil Painting answers those questions and many more. This comprehensive sourcebook explores the most advanced levels of oil painting, with full information on the latest scientific discoveries. Author and distinguished artist Virgil Elliott examines the many elements that let artists take the next step in their work: mental attitude, aesthetic considerations, the importance of drawing, principles of visual reality, materials, techniques, portraiture, photographic images versus visual reality, and color. Traditional Oil Painting helps artists master the secrets of realistic painting to create work that will rival that of the masters.

Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting
Vitamin P is an image-filled book that provides an international overview of the state of painting today. Documenting the most recent concerns, ideas and trends, Vitamin P explores the work of a vibrant new generation that is revitalizing this traditional, but continually updated, medium. Included are 114 of painting's leading practitioners, who were nominated by esteemed critics, curators and other experts from around the world. Each artist is represented by numerous examples of his or her work, accompanied by an explanatory text and short biography. Vitamin P illustrates the richness, eclecticism and dynamism of painting today. It is a critical sourcebook and reference work for seasoned art world veterans as well as newcomers to contemporary art.A stimulating introductory text is provided by Barry Schwabsky, who writes regularly for Artforum. He is currently Visiting Lecturer at Goldsmiths College in London.

Wall and Piece

The Artist's Way

The Elements of Drawing
John Ruskin's The Elements of Drawing, first published in 1857, remains one of the most sensible and useful books on how to draw and paint, both for the amateur and the professional artist. Ruskin reduces the art of drawing to its simplest elements-the making of marks, the perception of shapes and silhouettes- before going on to more complex exercises and the use of color.