The medium of acrylics is increasing in popularity and there is a growing number of books describing techniques both in general and for a variety of subjects. What this one offers is something really rather comprehensive.
It starts with the usual basic introduction to materials and colours, moving on to techniques with some rather useful notes on brushwork before the more familiar bits about shapes, composition and so on. Every book ever written seems to assume that it’s the only book ever written, so this stuff is pretty much inevitable and you just have to pick out anything that’s better than the usual run of the mill or which seems relevant to any specific need that you may have. There’s actually some quite good stuff here, so I’m going to give it 7/10 but with a gold star for being specifically relevant to landscape painting which is, after all the subject of the book.
From this point, after some perhaps carping criticism (but I do see an awful lot of books!), it all gets a whole lot better with sections and exercises on specific landscape elements including clouds, trees, mountains and water. The final section of the book, Putting It All Together, comprises a generous selection of demonstrations which cover just about any type of landscape you’re likely to want to tackle. Although this is an American book, the style won’t be at all alien to a British audience and no translation should be necessary on that score.
As a complete introduction to painting landscapes in acrylics, this is hard to beat.
Artbookreview.net 