Most lists of art books are lists of covers. What follows is six books we can describe accurately, with what each one is actually for, because a beginner's book and a reference book are different objects and buying the wrong one is the usual reason an art book ends up unread.
There are two things worth knowing before the list.
How to tell a useful art book from a padded one
Look at the ratio of demonstration to prose. A good practical book is mostly step-by-step sequences with photographs of the painting at each stage. A padded one is mostly paragraphs about creativity with a few finished pieces at the end.
Check whether it names pigments. A book that tells you to use ultramarine and burnt sienna is teaching you something transferable. One that says "a nice blue" is not.
Check whether the demonstrations show the ugly stage. Every painting looks wrong partway through. A book that photographs only the first block-in and the finished piece has skipped the part where you will need help.
Beware books that are a gallery in disguise. Plenty of beautiful volumes are essentially an artist's portfolio with a few captions. Lovely to own, useless to learn from.
Six worth buying
Lee Hammond's Big Book of Acrylic Painting
Lee Hammond, North Light Books, 2012. If you buy one book as a beginner, this is a reasonable choice. It is compiled from several of Hammond's earlier acrylic titles into a single volume of step-by-step exercises, organized by subject — still life, landscape, animals and people — so you can work on whatever you actually want to paint rather than following a curriculum. Hammond has written a great many instructional titles for the same publisher, and it shows in how methodically the steps are broken down. It is a doing book rather than a thinking book.
The Acrylic Artist's Bible
Marylin Scott, Search Press. This is the reference rather than the course. It is arranged as a manual of techniques and subjects with a large number of short demonstrations, so it works best as the book you open when you have hit a specific problem — how to handle a tree line, a stone wall, water — rather than one you read through. Scott trained at the Guildford School of Art and the Royal Academy, and the book has the tone of someone answering a practical question rather than inspiring you.
Painting in Acrylics: The Indispensable Guide
Lorena Kloosterboer, Firefly Books, 2014. The most thorough of the six, and the one to buy if you want to understand the material rather than follow exercises. It runs from paint types, mediums and supports through color theory and technique to professional practice, at over three hundred pages. Kloosterboer is a Dutch-Argentine realist painter, and the book carries the precision you would expect from someone working in a photorealist style. Denser than the others; correspondingly more useful once you have a canvas or two behind you.
Rethinking Acrylic
Patti Brady, North Light Books. Subtitled radical solutions for exploiting the world's most versatile medium, and it does what that promises. It is about the range of things acrylic can be made to do — transparent washes, heavy impasto, glass-like glazes, dense blacks — rather than about painting particular subjects. Brady works at a paint manufacturer's education program, so this is a book by someone who knows the chemistry as well as the brushwork. Buy it second, not first.
Abstracts in Acrylic and Ink
Jodi Ohl, North Light Books. A workshop-style book on layered, textured abstract work. The virtue of it for a beginner is that it removes the question of whether the drawing is right, which is the thing that stops most people, and gets you handling paint immediately. Ohl's approach is to start and adjust rather than plan. If representational painting feels intimidating, this is a way in.
Painting Portraits in Acrylics
Hashim Akib, Search Press, 2019. Specialist rather than general, and the one to buy only if portraits are what you want. Six step-by-step projects covering skin tone, palette, composition and working from photographs as well as from life. Akib paints in a loose, high-color, thick-brushstroke style, so this is not the book if you want tight realism — but it is unusually good at the thing beginners get wrong, which is treating a face as a set of features rather than as tonal shapes.
What a book cannot do
Reading about painting is not painting, and the gap between the two is wider in this subject than in most. The demonstrations only work if you do them, with paint, badly, several times.
The specific thing books are worst at teaching is seeing — looking at an object and identifying the four or five tonal shapes it is actually made of rather than the thing you know it to be. That is a habit built by practice.
It is also, oddly, the thing a numbered canvas is good at. A paint by numbers design hands you that breakdown already done: you watch a recognizable object assemble itself out of shapes you would not have identified on your own. It teaches nothing about drawing or composition, which is why the books above are worth reading — but the two go together better than people assume. Our note on whether paint by numbers helps you learn to paint sets out what each side covers.
Two corrections
An earlier version of this page said that abstract painting is easy because it involves shapes, and that black and white are complementary colors. Neither is true. Abstract work removes the constraint of likeness but not the difficulty of composition and color, and complementary colors are pairs opposite each other on the color wheel — red and green, blue and orange, yellow and violet. Our note on complementary colors covers it properly.
Where to start once you have read something
Whatever you buy, do the exercises on cheap paper before you commit to canvas — a pad of acrylic paper costs very little and removes the reluctance that stops people practicing. Our guides to choosing an acrylic paint set and what gesso is cover the materials, and if you would rather start with the picture already worked out for you, the designs in our kit collection are a reasonable first evening.
