****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
The negative reviews of this book astound me--with the reviewers' ignorance, timidity, lack of imagination, and laziness in their implicit expectation that Annie Sloan should be standing right there beside them, picking up paint cans, measuring & mixing pigments, and providing new designs exactly for their personal taste. Want her to spell "Phthalo Green" for you? Or explain why Raw Umber and Raw Sienna both have the word Raw in them? This book is not a book on pigment. The ideas in Modern Paint Effects: A Guide.....serve as just that--a guide to imaginative use of materials--paint, cloth, paper, gold leaf, even fingers, etc. available when the book was written. This book is not a color wheel. If creating color from pigments isn't familiar to you, visit a paint store, select paper samples that match colors in the book, buy the small containers of paint that match the samples, buy a tablet of watercolor or mixed media paper to practice on, a tool or two, and then experiment with some of Sloan's ideas that appeal to you. If you are unwilling to do even that, then hire a designer with an international reputation who works with or is a skilled painter, and pay them the big bucks they will charge. As for this books' ideas being cheesy, lame, or out of date, it was published many years before your review. Styles change. People have different personal preferences in decor. This book title says modern. So which ideas are cheesy? What particular attributes, on which pages, are cheesy and why? What makes glaze or gold leaf or sculpted rollers or stripes lame? Why? These "descriptive critiques" have no meaning. They are just name calling. As for not offering enough technique info, I opened the book at random. This produced page 33 "Using metallic paint", which includes 5 photos, each well described, and references to 4 other pages. Do you know how to use a roller? Look at top, left picture & see three things: a tray, a roller, and paint. Then there's a hand holding the roller handle. The round tube that rolls has been dipped in paint, pressed against a wall and moved up and down. More description won't make up for physically trying this. Have you tried? As for better faux finish books, painting stripes of sparkle paint (p.44-45) is faux what? Fence slats? Vertical blinds. It's not faux anything. It's different types of and pleasing colors of paint applied in layers in fairly straight lines called stripes. It's not a pretend anything. It doesn't look like zebra skin or tall grass. Nor is it intended to. If you prefer to paint plywood or MDF to look like rosewood or mahogany, use a book devoted to disguising something as something it's not. But this book is about "paint effects", not making plastic look like aged wood. The ideas in this book are imaginative, fun, challenging. I don't like all of them but how each effect is created is interesting. Maybe that effect, with a few differences: colors, or materials, or shapes, or angles, etc. would produce an effect I do like. I thoroughly enjoy this book. It's 5 star.
