Rethinking Acrylic: Radical Solutions For Exploiting The World's Most Versatile Medium Book

RETHINKING ACRYLIC isn't particularly easy to get into, it is front-loaded with a lot of technical information and the authors seems overly wedded to Golden Paints products. That said, if you flip back and forth between the demonstrations and examples and the front matter it becomes easier to digest--and it is not difficult to identify equivalent products or substitutions in most cases.

The author use a number of their own works to demonstrate the use of new products and techniques and also showcases a nice range of artists with other styles. The overall emphasis is in the use of acrylic products in ways that create unusual, often layered, textures and effects rather than simple laying of brush strokes. It would be the rare artists who didn't find something interesting to try in the cornucopia of ideas and the overall spirit of technically-informed experimentation will be useful to artists at all stages of their development.

After browsing through the book for a while it certainly prompted me to try out some new techniques. Pouring, waxes, using objects for texture, and lifting dried "skins' of paint to apply on other surfaces. These ideas shook up my approach to acrylics as promised and produced interesting results. I look forward to trying some of the other techniques in the future or adapting them to my needs.

It is unfortunate that the kindle version of this book is so poorly formatted, there are obvious and repeated errors in spacing, hard returns, and font color. Even a cursory proofreading would have detected these issues rather than inflicting them on the unfortunate reader. I am choosing to not let this effect y rating but it very much effects my reading experience.

This book is also beginning to show its age. There is an extended discussion of Golden Paints Garnet Gel which was discontinued around the time of initial publication in 2008, and many novel products developed in acrylic application since then are obviously not included. However most of the common types of paint modifiers and manipulation methods are at least introduced and this book is a good jumping off point for broadening your techniques.