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A Step-by-Step Beginner’s Guide to Creating with Paint & Mediums
Discover how easy, satisfying, and fun it is to create with acrylic paints and mediums in Creative Acrylics.
Acrylics are one of the most versatile, affordable, and accessible art mediums, and you’ll learn all the tips, tricks, and techniques for blending colors and building texture, plus excellent instruction on how to paint a range of different subjects.
Confused about which types of paints to use, and how to use them? Creative Acrylics cuts through the clutter and offers clear fundamentals for working with a variety of paints and mediums to produce beautiful results. Acrylic paint is water-soluble, dries quickly, and is forgiving, making it perfect for those starting out. Begin your acrylic painting journey with an expert who will guide you through enjoyable techniques and projects as you build confidence and ramp up your skills.
Step-by-step techniques, lessons, and projects cover a wide range of styles and genres, including color mixing, brushwork, glazing, and how to paint easy florals, still lifes, landscapes, and animals. Take your new skills even further and paint on different surfaces to create an apron, painted shells, a paintbrush rest, clay pot, and more.In Creative Acrylics you’ll find:
- How to set up your workspace to make painting more enjoyable
- A guide to the different types of acrylic paint
- Basic techniques such as understanding color and value, and how to add texture and other effects using paint and mediums
- Lessons and projects that build skills: creating still lifes, florals, landscapes and skies, and painting on fabric, wood, shells, clay, and more
With all these ideas and inspiration, your acrylic painting journey can begin today!
Perfect for all skill levels, the books in the Art for Modern Makers series take a fun, practical approach to learning about and working with paints and other art mediums to create beautiful DIY projects and crafts.
Carla Co Chua has loved drawing and painting since childhood, and her earliest influences include popular anime and cartoon shows on Philippine television. She graduated cum laude in information and communication technology management from De LaSalle University in Manila and, after several years of navigating the corporate world, she decided to reignite her passion for painting. Through her consistent social media postings on Instagram and YouTube and interactions with her audience, Carla found another calling: teaching. She has hosted several public and private art workshops since 2017 and has collaborated with art supply brands to teach acrylic and watercolor and painting at art events around Metro Manila. Carla continues to inspire artists with her beautiful artwork that includes florals, animals, portraits, landscapes, and still life. Carla lives in Manila, Philippines.
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The blank page isn’t daunting with 10-Step Drawing: Cats and Dogs
Featuring illustrated tutorials for drawing dozens of animals, Ten-Step Drawing: Cats and Dogs break down each subject into ten simple steps. All you need to get started is a pen or pencil and a piece of paper! Learn to draw more than 50 cat and dog breeds, including American Shorthairs, Persians, Maine Coons, Golden Retrievers, French Bulldogs, Great Danes, and many more!
Learn to draw your favorite cats and kittens, step by step, with Ten Step Drawing: Cats.
The blank page can be daunting, but the fun and approachable books in the Ten-Step Drawing series offer a quick and easy starting point for any doodler, illustrator, or aspiring artist to be creative. Featuring illustrated tutorials for drawing a variety of different animals, flowers, plants, and people, each book in this appealing series breaks down each subject into 10 simple steps. And all you need is a pen or pencil and a piece of paper!
Handy prompts help you learn to draw by encouraging you to express creative individuality, while helpful general drawing tips enable you to try out your drawing skills on other subjects not featured in the book. The projects feature instructions for graphite pencil, ink, and colored pencil, for a well-rounded introduction to drawing.
Learn to draw more than 50 cat breeds, including:
- Ragdolls
- American Shorthairs
- Persians
- Siamese
- Sphynx
- Maine Coons
- And many more!
The perfect reference for your first steps as an aspiring artist, Ten Step Drawing: Cats is sure to give you the courage to break out a pencil and paper and draw to your heart’s content!
Learn to draw your favorite dog breeds, step by step, with Ten Step Drawing: Dogs.
Learn to draw more than 50 dog breeds, including:
- Labrador Retrievers
- Golden Retrievers
- French Bulldogs
- Pugs
- Poodles
- Chihuahuas
- Great Danes
- And many more!
The perfect references for your first steps as an aspiring artist, Ten Step Drawing: Cats and Dogs are sure to give you the courage to break out a pencil and paper and draw to your heart’s content!
Designed especially for aspiring illustrators, doodlers, and art hobbyists, the fun and approachable books in the Ten-Step Drawing series encourage new artists to get acquainted with the basic principles of drawing so they can learn to create art with confidence. They are sure to encourage even the most reluctant artist to break out a sketchbook and doodle to their heart’s content. Other subjects in the series include Flowers, Animals, People, Nature, Manga, and Everyday Things. Ten-Step Drawing: Cats and Dogs both publish December 14, 2021.
Justine Lecouffe is an artist, illustrator, and graphic designer based in London, UK. She creates digital and traditional hand drawings encompassing fashion, beauty, architecture, and travel for clients in a wide range of industries, from book publishing to branding for jewelry and fashion designers. Her work has been published in a number of books, including Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, and her major clients include Apple, O2, National Trust, NHS, Redbull, Nivea, and Pandora. If you’d like to find out more information or see further examples of her work, find her on Instagram @justine_lcf.
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Finding Inspirations from The Nature, Fun Art Project to Do in This Upcoming Holidays
No matter where you live, whether the climate is tropical, arid, humid, oceanic, or cool, you likely have a great spot to observe nature, and you will find yourself feeling more peaceful. There really is beauty everywhere you look! In this upcoming holiday season, doing arts with your partner or your family is a great idea. Let’s fall in love with art, and having fun in the life.
In Nature Painting in Watercolor, the focus is all on the great outdoors—specifically, the plants that grow there. Beginning and aspiring artists can learn to create their favorite ferns, leaves, trees, florals, as well as animals, using the popular watercolor medium. Start by learning about the tools and materials needed to paint in watercolor; then dive into a thorough and fun painting techniques section, which covers washes, glazes, how to add detail in watercolor, and much more. If you’d like to spend more time outside (who doesn’t?), check out the section on finding inspiration outside for tips on viewing and gathering natural painting subjects, such as trees, grasses, flowers, and many other plants.
And if you can’t get outside, we’ve got you covered as well, with suggestions for where to find images online and photos to use as references. Also learn to sketch and keep a detailed sketchbook—skills that will help you when you get started on the step-by-step painting projects in the largest section of the book.
The step-by-step projects cover popular natural painting subjects, including the ones already listed here as well as rocks, mushrooms, buds, blooms, big and small trees, and forest animals. All are illustrated and painted in the author/artists’s signature contemporary watercolor style.
Nature Painting in Watercolor offers a fun, refreshing look at painting plants for today’s artist.
About the author:
Kristine A. Lombardi is a professional illustrator who began her career in advertising and promotions before leaving the corporate world to focus on design and illustration. The author and illustrator behind Nature Painting in Watercolor and Paint Every Little Thing (both from Walter Foster Publishing), as well as several children’s books, Kristine has also worked with a variety of well-known clients and teaches art classes at Montclair Art Museum. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with her cat, Boo. Learn more at kristinelombardi.com.
The Art of Paint Marbling takes you through all the tools, techniques, and tips you need to create your own marbled artwork. Closely following the successful The Art of Paint Pouring and its follow-up, The Art of Paint Pouring: Swipe, Swirl & Spin, The Art of Paint Marbling features a similarly easy-to-follow format and appealing aesthetic. Paint marbling is a contemporary technique with a long history. What started hundreds of years ago has evolved into a fun, modern art form that’s popular on YouTube and has been hailed as a trend by The New York Times.
Nowadays, paint marbling uses a base of thickened water, onto which paint is poured and then swirled. Dipping paper directly into the paint creates beautiful, abstract art that’s easy to do at home using minimal, affordable supplies.
Using step-by-step projects with thorough instructions, artists can use a variety of techniques to manipulate colored paint into intricate patterns and create marbled artwork on a variety of surfaces, including paper, cloth, and wood panels. Large, beautiful, and colorful photos accompany all of the projects and techniques. Paint marbling serves as a fun hobby for beginners, a new art form for more advanced artists looking for alternative techniques, and a family activity perfect for artists young and old.
With The Art of Paint Marbling, you can learn to use paper, paint, and water to create your own on-trend artwork!
About the author:
Rene Eisenbart is a Portland, Oregon–based artist. She spent 25 years creating botanical illustrations for The Oregonian and now teaches painting workshops locally and in Europe. Rene paints from her classroom studio and likes to incorporate watercolor, collage, acrylic, and more into her expressive paintings. She is a signature member of the American Watercolor Society, the National Watercolor Society, and the International Society of Experimental Artists. Learn more about Rene on her website: rene-art.com.
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Create beautifully embroidered art pieces featuring past and present female icons with Empowered Embroidery
With Art Makers: Empowered Embroidery, learn to sketch and stitch strong, recognizable women from all walks of life. Featuring sketching and illustration instructions, basic stitches, embroidery techniques, and 6 projects with portraits of famous women (Maya Angelou, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Frida Kahlo, Michello Obama, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Harriet Tubman), this book is a must-have tool for hands-on artists and crafters. If you’re a beginning embroiderer, start with the basic stitches and embroidery instructions at the beginning of the book. Essential tools, warm-up exercises, tips for embroidering facial features and hair, and general information on embroidery will give you the know-how you need to get started.
Sketch
This is when you begin to put the ideas on paper by sketching thoughts and ideas into icons and images. You can bring the ideas to life and give them a visual vocabulary. When referencing photographs or online images, be sure to use them as a guide, and don’t copy them. Interpret and expand upon what you see, adding your own details.
Refine
This is the time to decide what sketches and ideas stay and which ones get set aside for another project or kept in your sketchbook. Style and composition come into play here, and your style may be more realistic or simplistic. Think about how you want your embroidery to look. Does it consist of outlines, or are there areas that are filled with stitches to give the embroidery a bold look?
Line Drawing
To make an image suitable for embroidery, it’s important to transform your sketches and doodles into a clean line drawing. Using a pencil, an eraser, and tracing paper to refine drawing and finalize the layout and details. Now that you’ve gone through the process from research and brainstorm to sketches and refinement of a final line drawing, focus on the essential lines needed to embroider.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt was born in 1884 in New York City. She became the longest-serving First Lady of the United States and fought fiercely for the poor, workers, women and youth groups, Japanese-Americans, miners, and the Civil Rights movement. She expanded the traditional role of First Lady into one that gave her time to write, teach, and pursue reform politics. Eleanor used her privilege to enact change and advocate for those who suffered the most.
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou was many things in her lifetime, including a poet, an actress, a screenwriter, a dancer, and a civil rights activist. Maya experienced prejudice and racism while growing up in the South, and these experiences led her to help her friends Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. fight racial injustice. Maya Angelou used the power of her words to champion equality for Black women and men. In her books, including the internationally acclaimed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou explores issues of identity, family, racism, the struggle for freedom, and literacy. In spite of a life filled with sadness, death, and racial prejudice, Maya traveled the world and became a strong survivor, inspiring many lives with her writing and speaking.
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman was born around 1820 to enslaved parents. Conductor of the Underground Railroad, leading abolitionist, nurse, spy, and suffragist, Harriet escaped to freedom in 1849 and rescued and led dozens of enslaved people from Maryland to freedom in the North. One of her greatest achievements was the raid at the Combahee River, where Tubman and Union soldiers rescued more than 700 enslaved people working on nearby plantations. Harriet Tubman died on March 10, 1913, of pneumonia. She was buried with military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in New York.
About the author:
Amy L. Frazer is a Portland, Oregon–based illustrator, designer, and embroiderer. After studying art and illustration at the Columbus College of Art & Design, Amy worked as product designer. She left the corporate world in 2015 and now teaches art workshops in addition to working with a variety of clients. Learn more at amylfrazer.com.
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THE SECRETS OF ART – Discover the secrets, mysteries, hidden meanings and stories behind famous works of art.
A book full of surprises, discoveries, forgotten treasures and lost tales, THE SECRETS OF ART (Frances Lincoln / September 21, 2021 / $30) takes us on a journey through the art world’s mysteries to reveal that works of art are not always what they seem.
A long-lost medieval masterpiece unearthed in the Tower of London. A secret message that only an elite few can read encoded in a painting. A glimpse of a ghostly image beneath the surface of a portrait. The intriguing stories of these works, and many more, are brought to life by author, historian and art detective Debra N. Mancoff, as she reveals secret symbols used by Leonardo da Vinci, Vermeer and Caravaggio, uncovers layers of meaning in paintings by Van Gogh, Picasso and Dali, and provides insight into works by Frida Kahlo, Kara Walker and Marina Abramović.
- Reveals intriguing secrets and stories, appealing to the same audience as popular shows Secrets of the Museum, The Art Mysteries, Fake or Fortune and The Art Detectives
- Authoritative, eye-opening and well researched stories of paintings hidden beneath paintings, optical illusions, symbols and censorship
- A unique journey through the art world’s mysteries and discoveries, from iconic masterpieces to forgotten treasures
Drawing upon the findings of advanced technology, new research, scientific analysis and old-fashioned curiosity, The Secrets of Art unveils the layers of meaning beneath the surfaces of great works of art in a collection of tales that are fully based in fact but are as fascinating as fiction.
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Explore A World of Possibilities with This Stylish Compact Sketchbook Featuring A Sleek
Sketch – Medium Black is the ultimate blank canvas, with:
- Over 200 pages of blank, high-quality white paper
- A smooth black cover
- Layflat paperback design for ease of use
- Dimensions of 5.5 x 8.25 inches for on-the-go creating
This medium-sized sketchbook is perfect for a variety of needs:
- An art book for drawing, painting, and sketching
- A journal for creative writing
- A notebook for meetings or classes
- A practice book for calligraphy or handwriting
- A homemade recipe book
- An activity book for children
- And much more!
It also makes a great gift for the artist or creative in your life, as well as recent graduates or those starting their first job. Keep yourself and others always creating with this beautiful sketchbook!
With so much of our lives and contact going digital, the Creative Keepsakes journals offer an intimate way to nurture your connection with yourself and the people around you. An entertaining way to get off your screen, these guided and free-form journals are great for writers and artists alike. Each journal offers content around a different theme, including silly prompts for a laugh, random yet thoughtful questions, inspiration for art and composition, interactive prompts to learn about your heritage, and blank interiors on high-quality paper stock to use as your creative canvas. Beautifully designed and full of mindful prompts, channel your inspiration as you put pen (or pencil, or marker, or crayon!) to paper to learn more about yourself, your talents, and the people you love.
Other available sketchbooks in the series include: Sketch – Large Black, Sketch – Medium Kraft, and Sketch – Large Kraft.
With so much of our lives and contact going digital, the Creative Keepsakes journals offer an intimate way to nurture your connection with yourself and the people around you. An entertaining way to get off your screen, these guided and free-form journals are great for writers and artists alike. Each journal offers content around a different theme, including silly prompts for a laugh, random yet thoughtful questions, inspiration for art and composition, interactive prompts to learn about your heritage, and blank interiors on high-quality paper stock to use as your creative canvas. Beautifully designed and full of mindful prompts, channel your inspiration as you put pen (or pencil, or marker, or crayon!) to paper to learn more about yourself, your talents, and the people you love.
Also in this Series: 3,001 Questions All About Me, 301 Things to Draw, 301 Writing Ideas, Create Comics: A Sketchbook, Inner Me, Internet Password Book, My Father’s Life, My Grandmother’s Life, My Life Story, My Mother’s Life, 3,001 This or That Questions, My Grandfather’s Life, Create the Poem, Complete the Drawing Journal, Mom and Me Journal, Why I Love You Journal, Create the Story, and Destroy & Design This Journal.