Barron's Beginner Art Guides

Barron's Beginner Art Guides are substantial books that pack in lots of information at a value price. Covering the fundamentals of art, each guide provides a series of projects, presented in order of difficulty, and supplemented with practical suggestions, ideas for color experiments, and techniques for creating special effects.

The final page of each book presents a capsule biography of a famous artist whose work offers classic examples of the title's central subject.

Hardbound. 64 pages. 8¼" × 11" (21 cm × 28 cm).

Color and Creativity — This volume offers advice on mixing colors. It shows how to use contrasting colors on paper or canvas to create dramatic effects, or to evoke special moods and atmospheres.

Drawing with Charcoal, Chalk, and Sanguine Crayon — This volume summarizes basic art principles for art students and amateurs who want to expand their knowledge, and presents several dry-medium projects to complete. This title also presents a brief yet enlightening illustrated discussion of James Ensor (1860–1949), a Belgian artist particularly noted for his work in charcoal, chalk, and sanguine.

Painting Landscapes — This volume demonstrates the nearly limitless variety of styles that can be employed in rendering landscapes, with special attention to features of terrain, to trees, to the effects of weather and seasonal changes, and much more.

Painting with Oil — This volume offers advice on selecting ranges of colors to match the subject of a painting. Learn to thin and mix pigments, to use turpentine and other solvents, to use palette knives for mixing paints and for applying color directly to the canvas, and much more. The book's final page presents a capsule description of the Spanish Renaissance painter Francisco Pacheco and shows three of his paintings.

Painting with Watercolor — This volume introduces students to both cake and tube water-based pigments. It provides instructions for applying and controlling color on different grades of wet and dry paper. After studying a number of practical still life and landscape projects, students are invited to analyze three watercolor masterpieces by the English landscape artist John Constable.