Have you ever walked into an art supply store, stood in front of the amazing array of acrylic products and just thrown up your hands in confusion, leaving the store without buying something new to experiment with? If you've ever wondered what to do with all those products, then this book is for you. If you've been using acrylic in traditional painting forms, in this book you'll find grand, wild and inventive manipulations of acrylic that will get your creative juices flowing. Compared to more traditional art mediums such as oil and watercolor, acrylic is still in its infancy. But what it lacks in years, it makes up for in its range of use. Acrylics appeared on the market for artists in the late 1940s as a quick-drying alternative to oil paint. In its early manifestations, it dried so quickly that more than a few brushes stuck immediately to the canvas! Although acrylic has been around for more than fifty years, incredible advances continue to be made in the research and development of acrylic polymers and pigments. These advancements are attributable not only to the efforts of a few dedicated chemists, but also to the work of an entire community devoted to acrylic. There are a lot of brilliant minds taking these minute molecules very seriously.

This unique reference book is designed to excite and motivate you to push beyond traditional techniques and to explore new approaches to painting. Acrylic Fusion frees you from traditional approaches to painting by exposing you to a diverse range of alternative techniques, unconventional processes, and the integration of unique materials that stimulate creativity and encourage experimentation. It's a must-have resource aimed at artists who make paintings, but it is also a great reference for any crafters, makers, and DIYers who use paint in their work, whether they make art journals, design greeting cards, or refinish furniture because the techniques can easily be adapted for many different kinds of projects and applications.

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.

Liberate Your Creativity with Acrylic Paints! 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 To give you additional insight and inspiration, this book features a gallery of finished works by fellow painting revolutionaries that blend various acrylic techniques to create amazing effects. You'll also find practical advice that covers the basics and beyond—from selecting materials and cleaning your brushes to finishing and preserving your artwork. There's even a complete glossary of terms for fast and easy referencing. Pick up a brush and start your own acrylic revolution today! Use the techniques in this book to free your creative spirit and create the paintings you've always dreamed of.

Designed to address the issues of how to paint and what to paint, PAINTING AS A LANGUAGE covers a wide range of information of central importance to beginning and intermediate painting instruction. The authors emphasize the value of the student's cognitive understanding of the process and potential of painting in the student's overall progress in the studio. Blending journal writing with painting and drawing exercises, they guide the student through selecting meaningful subject matter as well as becoming adept at shaping and interpreting that material through the language of painting.

Vast collection of prompts, ideas, and insights provides a reading companion for students as well as amateur and professional visual artists, helping them find better ways to organize, manage, and develop inspiration.

With an unprecedented array of media and digital tools at their disposal, today's artists are faced with unlimited possibilities for creative experimentation. Never before has there been such innovation in the way art can be conceptualized, produced and presented. Art Revolution is on the cutting-edge, exploring how artists are reinterpreting, reinventing and redefining everything from the surfaces on which they work to the way viewers interact with their finished pieces. This book ventures off the beaten path to track the creative directions and signature styles of twenty-one of today's most visionary artists, including Dave McKean, David Mack, Marshall Arisman and Cynthia von Buhler. Brilliantly illustrated with inventive examples of two-dimensional, three-dimensional, digital and new media art, Art Revolution will inspire you to break out of the confines of traditional thinking, push your content to a higher level, and revolutionize your personal approach to art.

The Art of Theatrical Design: Elements of Visual Composition, Methods, and Practice, Second Edition, contains an in-depth discussion of design elements and principles for costume, set, lighting, sound, projection, properties, and makeup designs. This textbook details the skills necessary to create effective, evocative, and engaging theatrical designs that support a play contextually, thematically, and visually. It covers key concepts such as content, context, genre, style, play structure, and format and the demands and limitations of various theatrical spaces. The book also discusses essential principles, including collaboration, inspiration, conceptualization, script analysis, conducting effective research, building a visual library, developing an individual design process, and the role of the critique in collaboration. This second edition includes A new chapter on properties management and design. A new chapter on makeup design. A new chapter on digital rendering, with evaluations of multiple programs, overviews of file types and uses, and basic tutorials in Adobe® Photoshop® and Procreate. An expanded and revised chapter on traditional rendering, with the inclusion of new media, including watercolor, gouache, and mixed media, and updated exercises and tutorials. Revised and expanded chapters on individual design areas, including additional practices for conceptualization and collaboration, with new exercises for skill development. Additional exercises in all elements and principles of design chapters for investigation of each design principle and skill development. Revised and updated content throughout the text, reflecting current pedagogy and practices. This book gives students in theatrical design, introduction to design, and stagecraft courses the grounding in core design principles they need to approach design challenges and make design decisions in both assigned class projects and realized productions. The Art of Theatrical Design provides access to additional online resources, including step-by-step video tutorials of the exercises featured in the book.

Imagine having the ability to draw any subject with precision, detail and expression. With Claudia's help, you can do it! In How to See, How to Draw, you will discover how to tap into your powers of observation, strengthen your hand-eye connection, and draw the world around you with new skill and accuracy. Just take it one step at a time. Claudia is an expert teacher, breaking down complex compositions into a series of achievable shapes and values that even beginners will understand. Through dozens of mini demonstrations, fun-to-do exercises and complete step-by-step instruction, you'll learn everything from basic drawing techniques to more challenging methods for rendering wonderfully rich, in-depth compositions. Her visual instruction details how to: • Use a variety of drawing tools to suit your style and artistic intent • Learn to let go of preconceived ideas so you can observe lines, shapes and spatial relationships as they actually are • Create strong compositions through comparison and proportional control • Find, fix and avoid common mistakes by using simple grids and guide lines • Understand and work with perspective to create the illusion of depth • Reveal form through light and shadow • Explore the potential of texture to create mood and movement Claudia's drawings illuminate a range of subjects, including portraits, landscapes, animals and still life. You can practice using her reference photos and drawings, or you can apply her exercises to your own subjects. Start today, Claudia's way! Following her masterful guidance, you'll see the world through new eyes and draw better than you ever have before.

Since the latter half of the 20th century, committed art has been associated with conceptual, critical and activist practices. Painting, by contrast, is all too often defined as an outmoded, reactionary, market-led venture; an ineffectual medium from the perspective of social and political engagement. How can paintings change the world today? The question of painting, in particular, fuelled the investigations of a major 20th-century philosopher: the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907-61). Merleau-Ponty was at the forefront of attempts to place philosophy on a new footing by contravening the authority of Cartesian dualism and objectivist thought-an authority that continues to limit present-day intellectual, imaginative, and ethical possibilities. A central aim of The Question of Painting is to provide a closely focused, chronological account of his unfolding project and its relationship with art, clarifying how painting, as a paradigmatically embodied and situated mode of investigation, helped him to access the fundamentally “intercorporeal” basis of reality as he saw it, and articulate its lived implications. With an exclusive and extended conversation about the contemporary virtues of painting with New York based artist Leah Durner, for whom the work of Merleau-Ponty is an important source of inspiration, The Question of Painting brings today's much debated concerns about the criticality of painting into contact with the question of painting in philosophy.