5 Art Books That I Learned From

So this one isn’t art in the sense of learning technique. This one is about creativity. I read this while on medical leave after having to have a hysterectomy shortly after turning 30. I had been working retail for YEARS after finishing art school and was not in a good place. Basically, just surviving day to day. This book made me rethink A LOT and start to change my direction.

It talks about how everyone is entitled to make art and it makes life better. Just creating improves your quality of life. This is totally true. Now, I notice when I don’t start my day with a little doodling, or days when I don’t make SOMETHING. I get progressively aggravated the longer I go without creating.

The biggest thing for me was the author telling you to stop trying to monetize everything. Just make. Ignore the haters. The stuff you make isn’t for them anyway. Just like I don’t justify my tattoos, I don’t justify my art. If you don’t like it, then you aren’t the intended audience. And if your creation fails, learn from it. You have to have a pile of failures before something works. Plus, realistically, is anyone going to know your art 100 years from now? Probably not. So just relax.

The most interesting piece was that ideas are alive and present themselves to those that the idea believes can bring them to the world. You need to work to gain the knowledge and skills for these ideas to bring you inspiration to make them. Think about it. Haven’t you ever noticed that ideas repeat themselves? That one year there were like 5 movies about an asteroid hitting the world out at the same time??

Fear does you no good. Just let go, relax, trust the universe and your tribe will find you. The more authentic you are and free with your creativity, those like you will be drawn to you.

For me, this book is the holy bible of portrait painting….traditionally. It covers everything from prepping your surface to palettes, laying out paint on your palette, techniques…everything.

There are numerous activities and projects in it to guide you through getting set up for portrait painting and learning skills along the way. The colour cookbook is my favourite and actually very helpful. I’m making one from my acrylics right now to reference so I know exactly what the paints I have can do.

Further along in the book the author also approaches different ways of doing portraits. This is great because maybe an old master approach isn’t your thing.

Overall, this is full of invaluable information for someone wanting to learn portraits.

A couple of points about it I will make though are:
1) It is strictly oil paints.
2) You need to have a solid art skill foundation. I would say this is for an intermediate artist.
3) The colour recommendations are a bit outdated. There are a lot more modern pigments that would be better or less toxic alternatives.

In high school, I took a drawing course that was based on this book and it changed my drawing. There are a number of tips, tricks and practices in this book that I still use. For example, I will regularly rotate and flip my work to see it from another eye and triple-check my lines and proportions. When I am starting a painting or drawing, I will do it upside down.

I’ve personally been working on a drawing class using this book also. Though full disclosure I have the third edition and just found out a fourth edition came out…so I might have to buy the newest version lol.

To give you the gist of this book, it works with the theory (that is being supported by more and more research and evidence) that the two halves of our brain have different strengths. Drawing requires the right side while most of us operate on the left side. The left side is logical while the right side is creative. So say you are drawing an eye. The left side will say OK the eye is an oval, there is a circle for the iris and a circle for the pupil. The right brain will just see shapes and lines. It will look at negative space and the overall relationship of what it is looking at. If you are looking at someone in profile, you will notice the iris isn’t a circle because of perspective.

Another thing it mentions is each person has their brain programmed to work a different way. However, just because a brain is programmed one way, doesn’t mean you can’t learn to flip between the sides.

Seriously, this book gives invaluable skills and theories to experienced artists, and can also be encouraging to beginners in the fact that it argues that anyone can LEARN how to see like an artist and improve their skills.

This book finally got me to break free of representational painting. Is great fun with projects to learn from and even goes into basics like surface prep and colours. This most interesting project is painting a flower with only fifty brush strokes. It makes you seriously reevaluate what is important to get the form of the subject out.

This covers still lives, portraits of people and animals, landscapes, cityscapes, everything. The author has another book that is specifically portraits I will have to talk about in another post.

Bright-coloured grounds are also touched on in this book, which is putting down a bright colour as a base that you then paint on top of. the colour you pick will impact the overall tone and feel of the piece which the author very clearly explains.

What I love most about this is an artist of any level can jump in on it. If you are a beginner, things like how to hold the brush and colour theory are taught. If you are already an experienced artist, the activities in breaking down the image, or compositional layout can give you new ideas or challenges if you are like me and used to representational work.

The only negatives I can think of in this book are purely personal for me.
1) I am not a fan of cadmium. Even cadmium hues that don’t use real cadmium. I like uber bright and bold colours and I just find cadmium hues are a bit calm or neutral compared to something like a hansa yellow.
2) I’m not a fan of the particular brand of acrylic paint the artist suggests and uses. I have used it in the past, I just happen to prefer Liquitex and Golden now.

This book is essential reading for anyone wanting to get into acrylic paints. It covers EVERYTHING.

It covers what acrylic paints are, materials and equipment, colour and modern pigments, mediums applications and unique, fun approaches to using it.

This book is where I learned about the newest pigments and what I referenced to begin figuring out my palette while also referencing the Portrait Painting Atelier.

It was also the first place I found an easy-to-understand breakdown of acrylic mediums and what they can do. There is a picture in the book of a heavy gel medium mixed with an iridescent copper high-flow paint mixed into it and it blew my mind. Ways the mediums can be used are also suggested in it to give you ideas to get started.

Even with my two art degrees, this book had me learning because the acrylic industry has advanced a lot over the last ten years. There are some amazingly bold pigments now, which is why I have shifted to acrylics over the last few years.