Provides instructions for creating realistic landscape paintings.

Paint the charm of country scenes These tranquil scenes let you create your very own painter's retreat with a luminous sunset, a quiet cottage, a refreshing coastline and peaceful streams meandering past mills. It's easy and fun when you paint along with Dorothy Dent. With 10 step-by-step projects, suitable for both beginners and more accomplished painters, Dorothy shares her easy-to-follow techniques for painting realistic landscapes. Learn how to paint: • Rich autumn foliage • The vivid greens of spring • Colorful reflections found in still water • Glowing light from a window on a starry night • Snow-capped mountains created with a palette knife You'll also learn valuable principles such as consistent highlights and shadows, how to contrast lights and darks and how to use textures, colors and values. Dorothy shows you exactly how to hold the brush and position the bristles against the canvas so you can make confident brushstrokes. Each painting also features a special Seeing with the Artist's Eye section that teaches you the artistic principles that take a painting from average to extraordinary.

10 acrylic projects, including old covered bridges, rustic farmhouses, meandering brooks and more.

Paint a lazy stream or crashing waves with ease! The path to better water-themed paintings has never been clearer. Celebrated teacher and television artist Robert Warren presents a liberating new approach to painting that begins with acrylics and finishes with oils for impressive, luminous effects unlike any other method. Learn how to paint a favorite but ever-changing and complex subject in easy-to-follow steps! Inside you'll find: • Complete, illustrated instruction on this exciting technique in which an acrylic underpainting and directly applied value plan set the stage for oil-painting success • 12 fun step-by-step projects (plus line drawings) you can finish in a few hours • Lessons and tips for mastering water in all its forms, including oceans, rivers, lakes, falls, ponds, reflections and more • The simple solution to overworked, underwhelming oil paintings! No matter your skill level, perfect results are just pages away. So proven is Warren's method for portraying all different types of water that you will undoubtedly want to try it for every subject you paint!

Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.