I've been intrigued by the various Golden products and as a fiber artist wanted to combine some acrylic techniques with fabric and quilting. This is an excellent book. It is nicely divided into chapters and gives pointers on how to use the various products. Nancy Reyner gives step by step instructions on how to use different products to get different results. I've already tried some of the techniques and am inspired to try many more. I highly recommend this book!

This is not the typical "how to'. Plenty of techniques to inspire your creative bent.

this book details techniques that might come in handy for someone trying to use acrylics for crafts like scrapbooking or something, i guess. for me it was truly uninformative. there is literally a technique called "sticker mania," another called "make your own stencils" and another one called "jackson pollock" drips which just advises you to drizzle the paint like jackson pollock. like you couldn't figure any of those out on your own. why you would want to put stickers or stencils on your art is another question, but to each their own i guess.

it also goes through each of the acrylic mediums and describes how to use them (i.e., put them on your surface), which likewise doesn't seem to me to be very revolutionary.

above all that, the examples are uninspired and cliche, like i said they seem more like they should be in a scrapbooking guide rather than something aimed at aspiring artists...

instead i recommend barclay sheaks' "the acrylics book" which goes through many of the same techniques but many more, and he is an amazing artist with truly inspired examples of his and others' work throughout.

This book is very informative and also a springboard for lots of creative ideas and inspiration. Thank you Nancy Reyner for sharing your wisdom and whimsy.

Although there is no doubt that Nancy Reyner knows her medium, I was not at all impressed with this book. I was looking for a "revolution" of some sort, but found the title to misrepresent the contents. Most of the tricks are not really tricks, and the techniques are not really new. Most of them can be discovered simply by working with acrylics on a few projects and trying the medium youself. All of the qualities of the acrylic paint will without much labor inevitably bring you to the "discoveries" that this book presents.

What I would have liked to see is really something unexpected, something that could be shared by an experienced painter/artist, who would have come across an interesting technique either by chance of their daily experiments or by the virtue of their experience, and ... this book ... did not offer me that. I would say that this volume is really for beginners, and so much so, for those beginners who would want to read a book before they decide to try something out themselves. This book would have been a 1-star had it not have all the detailed images with accurate information in it. However, to use an analogy here, if you were a cook (whether a beginner or an experienced one) how much would you appreciate detailed step-by-step pictures of potato-peeling when what you really wanted to know are some new exciting recipes for it instead?

To decide whether to buy, I would recommend to brouse the book through the "look inside" option. If on the pages available for view you don't find anything special or of interest, then do not hope to find it in the rest of the book, since most of what's in it are pretty much variations of the same/similar techniques.