Create Perfect Paintings ─ An Artist's Guide to Visual Thinking

The ultimate resource and reference guide for artists!

As a painter, your two main objectives are to draw the viewer to your work and to sustain their attention long enough to create a meaningful viewing experience. The success of both of these goals revolves around the quality of visual choreography inherent in your art. This solution-based guide offers ways to identify and overcome the common problems faced by all painters in every medium.

To create the perfect painting, analysis and editing are critical. Create Perfect Paintings shows how to push your work to the next level by strengthening your perception, technical skill and visual thinking. Exercises and examples show how to critique your own creations and then evaluate them step by step for further improvement. You will compare illustrations and learn to identify and modify artistic choices--from negative space and color ratio to controlling eye movement, depth and contrast--to see their impact and help you use them to the best effect in your work.

• Section 1: Essentials--Reviews and defines artistic terms and concepts.
• Section 2: Play Phase--Shows you how to tap into your right brain. Learn to challenge the process and break habits to free your spirit and inspire variety in your art; also covers materials, tools and surfaces.
• Section 3: Critique Phase--Introduces a groundbreaking method of contemporary critique called The Viewing Game a comprehensive, systematic and fun way to analyze, edit and enhance your paintings.
• Sections 4 and 5--Bonus sections explore how to resolve creative blocks, convey artistic messages, boost your personal style, display your work and turn painting into a career.

"May this book increase your productivity, add ease and flow to your creative process, clarify your ideas, add nuance to your personal style, and most importantly, add joy to the miraculous act of painting." --Nancy Reyner

For Nancy Reyner, art is more than a profession, even more than a passion. For this accomplished painter, author, teacher and designer, it’s both a way of life and a way of looking at the world, of observing not just the physical matter that attracts our attention but also, more importantly, what emerges from the elusive spaces in between. She uses this outlook to create luminous, otherworldly paintings that hover between pure abstraction and realistic landscape. This unique vision enables her to teach artists of all levels of experience, and working in any style. Born and raised in Philadelphia, PA, Nancy received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, an MFA from Columbia University, and now resides in Santa Fe, NM. Nancy has appeared on television for HGTV, written several books on painting, and produced many instructional DVDs. Visit her website at nancyreyner.com.