Imagine an art school where more than a dozen popular oil painters teach, and you've imagined Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Oil Painting, a full-to-the-brim anthology of Watson-Guptill's finest instruction in oil painting from the recent best-selling authors. In this treasure trove you'll find an overview of the tools and materials of oil painting, along with advice about color palette, color mixing, and applied color theory. You'll learn about preparing a canvas, designing a composition, direct painting, scumbling, blending, layering, glazing, impasto, monotyping, and more. Let the experts show you the most effective ways to work with light and shadow, model forms, handle values, and achieve color harmony, as well as how to develop ideas and solve common painting problems. Capture the heat of summer light or the crisp, cold light of winter. Paint a brilliant blue sky filled with billowing clouds or the lifting of a late morning mist. The pros teach all this and more in the section on landscape painting. You'll learn, too, from the masters how to express with confidence the many gestures, moods, and forms of the human figure on the section on figure painting. In the section on still life, you'll find out how to create interesting setups and translate the forms and textures of objects into paint. Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Oil Painting has something for everyone, from the greenest novice to the more experienced painter. It's filled with detailed step-by-step demonstrations, some based on working from photographs and sketches, and others focusing on painting on location and from live models. And, there are plenty of inspiring finished paintings by favorite Watson-Guptill artists. All in all, for breadth and variety in both teaching and painting styles, this book is the best value in oil painting instruction available today. Marian Appelof is a senior editor at Watson-Guptill Publications.