Easy Acrylic Painting: Beginner Tutorials for Small Still Lifes

Visual arts instructor Funnell’s book offers 10 still life projects to create using acrylic paints. The first chapter gives a comprehensive overview of the composition of acrylic paint, in which Funnell explains the difference between student-quality and artist-quality paints. There is also an introduction to concepts such as color shift and viscosity and painting techniques that include glazing, dry brush painting, and impasto. Additionally, there’s advice on how to transfer a sketch to a surface for painting. The section on color theory includes an excellent guide to color mixing, creating grays, and identifying tonal variations; Funnell’s definitions of “tint” and “shade” are particularly helpful. For each of the 10 still-life projects that follow, there’s a list of tools and ingredients (including specific paint colors) and illustrated step-by-step instructions. The paintings incorporate shadows, highlights, and reflections through the blending of colors and layers; each project is labeled with an icon indicating the direction of light, an especially valuable feature.