Acrylics Companion, The

Leisure Painter – October 2024

Your pocket-sized, one-stop guide to contemporary acrylics inspiration, practical exercises and exciting ideas for acrylic artists. In this innovative, ideas-led mini guide, master artist and best-selling author Hashim Akib showcases the versitility and vibrancy of acrylic painting. Featuring 64 practical exercises and inspiring insights, on a wide range of subjects, from portraiture to the urban landscape and using a variety of approaches, from colour dabbing, working on a base colour and refining chaos into order, this book is ideal for beginners to intermediate artists. It will inspire you with new ideas, push you creatively, and encourage you to develop your own artistic style.

Library Journal – Jan 15 2025
Artist Akib (Painting Portraits in Acrylic) dives into the details of acrylic painting, beginning with a discussion of some of the medium’s unique traits: a short drying time, suitability to a variety of surfaces, and the ability to thin the paint with water. Although the opacity of acrylics can present some challenges for artists, Akib shows that the medium’s vivid colors and the ease of painting over mistakes make up for any defaults. Akib explores how a variety of mediums and tools can be used alongside acrylics to alter the paint’s consistency, texture, and drying time and demonstrates how brush pressure affects coverage. Readers are encouraged to try using acrylics to paint the same subject with three different techniques: by filling underlying line art with color, by using negative shapes, and by employing optical color mixing, a method favored by the impressionist painters. Dynamic street scenes, portraits, and landscapes illustrate Akib’s mastery of laying down blocks of bold color to form the foundation of paintings, to which details and highlights are gradually added.
VERDICT Many of Akib’s techniques require an advanced level of artistic skill, but for experienced painters interested in trying a new medium or improving their work with acrylics, this is a comprehensive resource.