Painting with Acrylics

Barron's Beginner Art Guides offer basic instruction in a variety of techniques and media. As the series title states, these books are practical manuals for beginners in art, presenting short, easy-to-understand explanations of techniques and materials, exercises, supplemented with illustrative sketches, and general advice on drawing and painting. The last page of each manual focuses on a widely recognized artist who has produced well-known paintings or drawings in the medium or technique that is the book's focus. Acrylics are modern, plastic-based pigments widely used today to render effects similar to artworks once done exclusively in gouache or tempera. Beginners are instructed in brushwork, in mixing and blending colors, and in using the bright, opaque acrylic pigments to their best effect. This manual's final page briefly sketches the life and work of twentieth-century French painter Jean Dubuffet, who was a master of acrylic painting.