Acrylic Painting For Dummies

Basic Acrylic Instruction-Amazing Results!

This resource is packed with the best of Lee Hammond's lessons and tips on working with acrylics, including more than 80 step-by-step exercises and demonstrations that will have you creating amazing paintings in no time flat.

Success is easy-just follow along with Lee!

With just seven to nine pigments, you can paint anything. You'll learn how to add layers and details, one stroke at a time. Along the way, Lee 's friendly encouragement and quick tips will help you work past what she calls "the awkward stage," so you can complete your paintings with confidence.

In addition to detailed information on selecting materials and mixing colors, you'll also get complete visual instruction for painting subjects of all kinds, including:

• Still Life: Get proper proportions every time, using easy graphing techniques. You'll also find demonstrations for painting the tricky parts, such as glossy textures and reflective surfaces.
• Landscapes: Lee shares proven tips for creating depth and realism in subjects ranging from forests and mountains to prairies and seascapes. She also shows how to paint realistic clouds, trees, water and more.
• Animals: This chapter provides step-by-step guidance for painting all your favorite creatures. There's even extra instruction for getting the eyes, noses, fur and feathers just right.
• People: Painting people can be especially challenging, but success is easy with basic steps and practical guidance. One feature at a time, you'll learn simple techniques for painting faces of all kinds-male or female, young or old. You'll also find in-depth guidance for creating realistic fleshtones, eye color, hair and more.

Acrylic is often used as a substitute for oil paint or watercolor, but the real gold mine is in allowing the medium freedom to do what it does best. This book shows how today’s artists are doing exactly that. It’s loaded with original artwork and valuable insight from 64 artists, incredibly diverse in styles and subjects, each using acrylic in unique ways to create expressive and personal art.

· 64 artists offer their individual ideas, approaches and inspirations for working with acrylic paints

· 29 styles, ranging from photorealism to minimal color field and everything in between, are explored through artist profiles, artwork and boundary-breaking “challenges” that provide dynamic starting points for your own art

· 29 step-by-step demonstrations illustrate acrylic-driven techniques you can take straight to your work, including collage and assemblage, reverse painting, printmaking, accidental stenciling, working with metallic mixtures and more

A follow-up to the best-selling Acrylic Revolution, Acrylic Innovation takes you outside your comfort zone. Dip in whenever you feel the urge to experiment, have fun and see fresh and exciting results.

• Quick and easy step-by-step instructions for drawing everything from simple spheres to apples, trees, buildings, and the human hand and face

• More than 500 line drawings, illustrating each step

• Time-tested tips, techniques, and tutorials for drawing in 3-D

• The 9 Fundamental Laws of Drawing to create the illusion of depth in any drawing

• 75 student examples to help gauge your own progress

In just 20 minutes a day for a month, you can learn to draw anything, whether from the world around you or from your own imagination. It’s time to embark on your creative journey. Pick up your pencil and begin today!

A New York real estate tycoon plunges to his death on a Manhattan sidewalk. A trophy wife with a past survives a narrow escape from a brazen attack. Mobsters and moguls with no shortage of reasons to kill trot out their alibis. And then, in the suffocating grip of a record heat wave, comes another shocking murder and a sharp turn in a tense journey into the dirty little secrets of the wealthy. Secrets that prove to be fatal. Secrets that lay hidden in the dark until one NYPD detective shines a light.

Mystery sensation Richard Castle, blockbuster author of the wildly best-selling Derrick Storm novels, introduces his newest character, NYPD Homicide Detective Nikki Heat. Tough, sexy, professional, Nikki Heat carries a passion for justice as she leads one of New York City's top homicide squads. She's hit with an unexpected challenge when the commissioner assigns superstar magazine journalist Jameson Rook to ride along with her to research an article on New York's Finest. Pulitzer Prize-winning Rook is as much a handful as he is handsome. His wise-cracking and meddling aren't her only problems. As she works to unravel the secrets of the murdered real estate tycoon, she must also confront the spark between them. The one called heat.

Full of energy and short of funds, old chums Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley decide to form the "Young Adventurers," and advertise themselves as willing to "go anywhere and do anything." Asked by a British Intelligence official to find a woman named Jane Finn, who disappeared with sensitive government documents, they soon find that their whimsical idea has drawn them into a complicated web of intrigue, intelligence agents, dubious identities, missing government papers, false clues - and all-too-real danger.

GAME OF THRONES: A NEW ORIGINAL SERIES, NOW ON HBO.

Dubbed “the American Tolkien” by Time magazine, George R. R. Martin has earned international acclaim for his monumental cycle of epic fantasy. Now the #1 New York Times bestselling author delivers the fifth book in his landmark series—as both familiar faces and surprising new forces vie for a foothold in a fragmented empire.
 
A DANCE WITH DRAGONS
A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE: BOOK FIVE
 
In the aftermath of a colossal battle, the future of the Seven Kingdoms hangs in the balance—beset by newly emerging threats from every direction. In the east, Daenerys Targaryen, the last scion of House Targaryen, rules with her three dragons as queen of a city built on dust and death. But Daenerys has thousands of enemies, and many have set out to find her. As they gather, one young man embarks upon his own quest for the queen, with an entirely different goal in mind.

Fleeing from Westeros with a price on his head, Tyrion Lannister, too, is making his way to Daenerys. But his newest allies in this quest are not the rag-tag band they seem, and at their heart lies one who could undo Daenerys’s claim to Westeros forever.

Meanwhile, to the north lies the mammoth Wall of ice and stone—a structure only as strong as those guarding it. There, Jon Snow, 998th Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, will face his greatest challenge. For he has powerful foes not only within the Watch but also beyond, in the land of the creatures of ice.

From all corners, bitter conflicts reignite, intimate betrayals are perpetrated, and a grand cast of outlaws and priests, soldiers and skinchangers, nobles and slaves, will face seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Some will fail, others will grow in the strength of darkness. But in a time of rising restlessness, the tides of destiny and politics will lead inevitably to the greatest dance of all.