The Acrylic Painter: Tools and Techniques for the Most Versatile Medium

A complete course on acrylic painting for beginners and experienced artists that covers classic approaches and new innovations

Embraced for versatility, quick-drying properties, and non-toxicity, no medium offers a wider range of effects forcreating highly expressive art than acrylics. With its flexibility and ease of use, acrylic paint is a must-try for painters—no matter your skill level. 

Here noted artist and School of Visual Arts instructor James Van Patten draws from years of experience to show you how to use acrylics to achieve a variety of results—from watercolor-like transparency and the flatness of tempera and gouache to the buttery quality of oils. He presents an insider’s look at the most up-to-date tools, materials, and techniques used by top painters in the medium to produce highly expressive art. 

Van Patten offers guidance on materials, processes, balance, and composition, and focuses on effectively using color in painting. Replete with detailed step-by-step technical demonstrations and a catalog of inspiring works by notable past and contemporary artists, as well as the author himself and his students, The Acrylic Painter provides a complete, classic art instruction manual for painters of all abilities in one of today’s most popular types of paint.

About the Author

James Van Patten is a native of Seattle, Washington, where he graduated from the University of Washington in 1965 with a BA in art education with an emphasis on painting. He completed his MFA in 1968 in Painting with minors in both Art History and Printmaking from Michigan State University. He has taught painting (as well as other studio classes), and lectured in art history at the university level in the ensuing years on both coasts and in the Midwest. Presently, he is a professor of painting at the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY. There he has taught the only course in acrylic techniques offered by SVA for over twenty years. He’s spent bulk of his career in the studio as a practicing artist, working primarily in acrylic paint on large-scale landscape paintings. OK Harris, New York, NY represented him exclusively for over thirty years, and for over a decade the Plus One Gallery of London has shown his work exclusively in England. His work is featured in collections throughout the United States and Europe.

My Review

So I have to say this is not the book I was hoping it would be, but I ended up being happy anyway. I thought this would be a guide book to painting with acrylics and instead it teaches you about acrylics. I have never been a big painter before so I was hoping for a DIY guide to everything. This book does a great job teaching you about which paints are better, what not to buy, and different painting styles. However it did not teach me how to paint them. There were some guides to getting started in different areas of painting like abstract, but noting concrete. Also if you have kids you might not want to leave this book lying around because there are a lot of pictures of paintings of naked people in this book. I was sent this book for free for only my honest and unbiased review.