Welcome back to the Canvas Academy online blog!

Today, I’m going to share a short and sweet book review with you… and today’s book to-be-reviewed is called “Painting Party”, which is a book designed for beginner artists to learn new and unique painting tips and tricks.

As an experienced artist myself, I wanted to kind of “test drive” this book for all you fellow painters and let you know what I think. So, I looked into it with a video, which you can watch below, and you can read even more of my insights down below.

Watch the Video Book Review

A Fast Review: “Painting Party”

This book is full of unique painting projects that you can try, and I found that, overall, it can help you spark your creativity when it comes to painting. However, I’m not exactly sure it’s all beginner-level stuff, and here’s why…

Each Project Has Confusing Steps

So, the projects included in this book are actually pretty unique and fun, but the steps it takes to get to a finished result are… well, a little bit confusing.

As you can see in the video above, I found that there were way too few steps in the beginning parts of most of the painting projects in the book… and then there were way too many steps toward the ends of the projects. This means that the sketch and “layout” parts of each project were not detailed enough, and beginners will struggle to get each project started correctly because of that.

On the other hand, there seemed to be too many steps during the actual painting process of every project, and that made it feel like it took forever to get to the end. This back and forth between too few and too many steps, then, kind of confused me… and I’m not even a beginner artist!

But There Is a Variety of Projects

I really did enjoy the array of painting projects in this book, and I love how different they all are. You get a chance to practice making animals, landscapes, and more with every one of the projects.

I will also say that the style of some of the projects are a little more on the “cartoon-ish” side, and that’s not always my style since I enjoy a lot more realism. However, this style is great for beginners to try since you never know what you’ll like until you try it out!

And There Are Some Technique Tips

This book also covers some good acrylic painting techniques, like layering and simple blending.

However, I found that each project required a lot of very specific acrylic paint colors; for example, something like “sap green” or “yellow ochre”. As a beginner, you may not have so many different colors on-hand, and I find that it’s much easier (and cheaper) to just mix your own colors out of the primary acrylic ones.

This all just relates to color theory, which isn’t covered very much in this book. But it’s still super important for all levels of artists to learn and understand!

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Now, as I said in the video above, I’d really like to do some more painting-related book reviews here on my blog and over on my YouTube. So, hit me up if you have any other book suggestions when it comes to what I should take a look at next!

And happy painting to all…

–Kari