Create Perfect Paintings: An Artist's Guide to Visual Thinking

by Nancy Reyner

Overview

The Ultimate Resource and Reference Guide for Artists!

Discover an innovative self-critique method that will empower you to answer the artist's most common questions: Now What? and Is it Finished? With hundreds of insights, tips, and illustrated techniques, Create Perfect Paintings shows you how to push your work to the next level regardless of medium or style by strengthening your perception, technical skills, and visual thinking.

Exercises and examples illustrate how to critique your own creations and evaluate them step by step for further improvement. You will learn to identify and modify artistic choices—from negative space and color ratio to controlling eye movement, depth and contrast—to see their impact and help you use them to the best effect in your work. What you'll find inside:

   • Section 1: Essentials—Reviews and defines artistic terms and concepts.
   • Section 2: Play Phase—Shows you how to tap into your creative right brain. Learn to challenge the process and break habits to free your spirit and inspire variety in your art; also covers materials, tools and surfaces.
   • Section 3: Critique Phase—Introduces a groundbreaking method of contemporary critique called The Viewing Game: a comprehensive, systematic and fun way to analyze, edit and enhance your paintings.
   • Sections 4 and 5—Bonus sections explore how to resolve creative blocks, convey artistic messages, boost your personal style, display your work, and turn painting into a career.

"May this book increase your productivity, add ease and flow to your creative process, clarify your ideas, add nuance to your personal style, and most importantly, add joy to the miraculous act of painting." —Nancy Reyner

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781440344190
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/17/2017
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	1,146,291
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 10.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

For Nancy Reyner, art is more than a profession, even more than a passion. For this accomplished painter, author, teacher and designer, it’s both a way of life and a way of looking at the world, of observing not just the physical matter that attracts our attention but also, more importantly, what emerges from the elusive spaces in between. She uses this outlook to create luminous, otherworldly paintings that hover between pure abstraction and realistic landscape. This unique vision enables her to teach artists of all levels of experience, and working in any style. Born and raised in Philadelphia, PA, Nancy received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, an MFA from Columbia University, and now resides in Santa Fe, NM. Nancy has appeared on television for HGTV, written several books on painting, and produced many instructional DVDs. Visit her website at nancyreyner.com.