Oil Painting Techniques: Learn How to Create Dynamic Textures with the Versatile Painting Knife

This book contains great information for the new artist. Painting with the knife was totally foreign to me until I read this book.

I was given a very good recommendation to this book, and found it to be quite a valuable resource, showing how to create textures and the many different applications of oil medium. Powell shows many Painting knives techniques. It's a great book for those new to and exploring painting knives.

I have mixed feelings on this book. On one hand it's small and very to the point, with lots of color photographs which explain things better than lots of words. On the other I think there is not enough coverage of the knife techniques and too much coverage of the demonstrations. For example there are no exercises for practicing the knife techniques, which is something I got out of another book "Learn to Paint With a Knife" that I found extremely helpful. The hardest part of learning to paint with a knife for me was to put down paint over wet paint. This book dedicates just a few sentances on the subject, which were not enough to help me at all. More than half the book is demonstrations, like "this is how to paint a rock" "this is how to paint a cloud" etc. I am sure it's good pratice to learn how to paint these but I feel it's a cookie-cutter approach and when the reader wants to paint something else, like a building or a still life for example he will be lost. Why do these books always use a mountain for the big demo at the end? In the end it just seemed a little too much like Bob Ross for me. Search google for the author and if you want to paint like him (he does very nice work, just not my style) then this book is for you. If not, I still recommend this book for the color photos and because it's not expensive.