Paint People in Acrylic With Lee Hammond

You are this close to buying the perfect book for first-time people painters! This fantastic book combines the easy-to-use medium of acrylic paints with beginner-friendly instruction designed to help you achieve realistic likenesses.

With Lee Hammond's simple, step-by-step approach, you'll learn how to start with a basic foundation of color, then add layer after layer, gradually building towards a likeness. (Sound easy? It is!) A whopping 50 step-by-step demonstrations teach you basic techniques, how to paint individual facial features and, ultimately, how to accurately portray subjects of every age, complexion and ethnicity. Ten start-to-finish portrait demos bring it all together.

Along the way, Lee shares her best tips from her 20 years of teaching experience: what colors to mix to get "skin," an easy trick for adding a hint of color to cheeks, what makes a good background, and expert advice on:

• Painting notoriously tricky elements, like eyes, ears, teeth, hair and clothing
• Capturing the look of age and the glow of youth
• Working from a reference photo
• Using the grid technique to simplify portraits and create an accurate preliminary sketch