Nov 13th 2018

New Book by Will Kemp, Artist and Teacher Extraordinaire

by Mary L. Tabor

Mary L. Tabor worked most of her life so that one day she would be able to write full-time. She quit her corporate job when she was 50, put on a backpack and hiking boots to trudge across campus with folks more than half her age. She’s the author of the novel Who by Fire, the memoir (Re)Making Love: a sex after sixty story and the collection of connected short stories The Woman Who Never Cooked. She’s a born and bred liberal who writes lyric essays on the arts for one of the most conservative papers in the country and she hosts a show interviewing authors on Rare Bird Radio. In the picture Mary L.Tabor

 

Still Life Acrylic Project Book, with three simple painting projects, will get anyone who ever wanted to hold a paint brush not only started, but confident. The book is available online for only £12.99 or at the bargain price of £9.99 if you buy it before November 14, 2018.

Still Life Acrylic

 

Here’s the link: https://willkempartschool.com/product/still-life-acrylic-project-e-book/

I am here to sing Will Kemp’s praises and review this new e-book because I have been studying with Will since January 2016, long distance but close in heart—Will lives in Britain and I live in the States.

I had never painted before or even taken an art class—well, there was that one at the Smithsonian Institution’s Campus-on-the-Mall where I came out feeling like a total dunce and decided not to give up but was in a total muddle. This book will get you out of such a muddle and get you started. It is so good that I recommend it for artists who know what they are doing but want to understand acrylics better.

Will Kemp

 

With Will as your teacher, you will never feel stupid or that you shouldn’t try. Very simply, Will Kemp has been a gift in my life. 

First, a bit of his bio: Will Kemp was awarded a Queen Elizabeth Craft Scholarship to study Classical Portraiture in Florence, Italy. He’s designed art curriculums for schools, developed interactive learning resources with the National Gallery, London, and taught students from all different starting points the principles of how drawing and painting work. 

Most of his teaching can be found online—the way I found him—at this YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/user/willkempartschool where he has nearly 170,000 subscribers— and for good reason—and where he actually replies to comments (when does he have time?) and helps his students: He cheers you on, gives you hope and teaches the basics and more, much more. 

Many of his beginning courses are free: I started with his demonstration of a cherry and then his apple. Below is the second painting I ever painted. These are step-by-step YouTube videos with a remarkable mentor and guide. My apple is no masterpiece but it made me believe I could pick up a brush again and that investing in the best paints, a palette knife, two or three good brushes was worth it. Good, rather than student grade in brushes and paints, matters for your sense of success and Will explains why. He’s right. I’ve tried both. 

Here is my second painting done on a canvas board:

Mary's Apple

 

After doing only two of these, I eventually bought every video course Will has offered. All of them are super affordable and well-worth every single cent. I will explain. 

The new e-book is a super inexpensive way to begin because he lists very few inexpensive though good quality tools. He explains basics, such as how to load a palette knife with just the right amount of paint for the effect you want to achieve when mixing your color. You use a disposable tear-off palette that makes clean-up quick and easy, and he uses only seven paints in this book. You can even do your painting on an MDF board, but I’ve found that investing in a small pre-primed canvas gave me better results and allowed me to fix mistakes—yeah, a lot of them—more easily. 

The key gifts of this e-book are his simple, easy to understand explanations of shadows and how light falls, of how to create three-dimensional objects in your still life. He explains color intensity: what that means and how to mix paints that don’t turn into mud, but instead glow before your beginner’s eye. Will provides step-by-step photos that you can print from the e-book for the drawings and the various steps in each of the three main lessons. My prediction, for anyone totally new and making that stab at trying to paint, is that you will feel amazed—and brave. 

One of his key lessons in this e-book is how and why you should use a colored ground, a solid opaque color, to begin. This is what the masters used in their paintings. Will shows you how to get that first layer of paint onto your canvas and how that basic layer will affect everything else you later add. 

He’s also broken the 3-full-color lessons into small sections so that you can do each one in about two hours—even, as he says “if you’ve never painted before.” 

The closing lesson is a gorgeous tea cup with French macaroons that graces the cover. Here is Will’s painting from the cover. And you can do this!

 

Macronies

 

From his basic acrylic color mixing video course, I recently painted his lemons. 

Here is Will’s painting that I used as my guide:

Will Kemps lemons

 

And here is mine:

Marys lemons

 

Although Will’s focus is acrylic painting, he is also an expert oil painter and has a course on oil portraits that I learned much from even though I can’t use oils in my confined living space. 

He doesn’t teach a full course on watercolor paintings, but in his video Urban Sketching Course, he does use watercolors and I learned bunches. I was able to paint a series of some eighteen letters to my granddaughter while she was experiencing her first overnight camp experience for two weeks when she was only eight years old. No, I didn’t use watercolor paper and, yes, I did imitate a gorgeous children’s book This Is a Poem That Heals Fish by Jean-Pierre Siméon, illustrated by Olivier Tallec. In each letter, I repeated the story and painted a small watercolor on my stationary. Here’s one example:

Marys watercolour

 

And now, I’m exploring watercolor painting, on my own, though praying for a Will Kemp course. 

I close here with a small success story that I owe almost 100 percent to Will Kemp. In his video course entitled Still Life Master Class, I got brave enough to triple the size of his demonstration, to measure out and resize the proportions and to learn how to create reflections. It’s no masterpiece, but it hangs in my kitchen and will grace, with Will Kemp’s permission and I give him credit, the cover of the second edition of my collection of short stories The Woman Who Never Cooked, coming soon.

Marys still life

 

If you want to experiment with painting, if you want to enrich your life, if you want to make something you never thought you could, begin with Will Kemp’s brand new e-book Still Life Acrylic Project Book. You won’t regret it.

 


This article is brought to you by the author who owns the copyright to the text.

Should you want to support the author’s creative work you can use the PayPal “Donate” button below.

Your donation is a transaction between you and the author. The proceeds go directly to the author’s PayPal account in full less PayPal’s commission.

Facts & Arts neither receives information about you, nor of your donation, nor does Facts & Arts receive a commission.

Facts & Arts does not pay the author, nor takes paid by the author, for the posting of the author's material on Facts & Arts. Facts & Arts finances its operations by selling advertising space.

 

 

Browse articles by author

More Essays

Mar 12th 2020
EXTRACT: "Repeated stress is a major trigger for persistent inflammation in the body. Chronic inflammation can lead to a range of health problems, including diabetes and heart disease. The brain is normally protected from circulating molecules by a blood-brain barrier. But under repeated stress, this barrier becomes leaky and circulating inflammatory proteins can get into the brain. The brain’s hippocampus is a critical brain region for learning and memory, and is particularly vulnerable to such insults. Studies in humans have shown that inflammation can adversely affect brain systems linked to motivation and mental agility. There is also evidence of chronic stress effects on hormones in the brain, including cortisol and corticotropin releasing factor (CRF). High, prolonged levels of cortisol have been associated with mood disorders as well as shrinkage of the hippocampus. It can also cause many physical problems, including irregular menstrual cycles."
Mar 12th 2020
EXTRACT: "It’s important to do things that make you happy or content as you are doing them – and doing them for yourself. Research has found that picking recovery activities you find personally satisfying and meaningful is more likely to help you feel recovered by the next morning."
Feb 22nd 2020
EXTRACTS: "A recent study of nearly 3,000 physicists found that a scientist’s most highly cited publication had an equal probability of being published at any point within the sequence of papers the scientist published.........Creativity is not the prerogative of the young, but can occur at any stage in the life cycle...........there is not a single kind of creativity, but that in virtually every intellectual discipline there are two different types of creativity, each associated with a distinct pattern of discovery over the life cycle. The bold leaps of fearless and iconoclastic young conceptual innovators are one important form of creativity. Archetypal conceptual innovators include Einstein, Picasso.......very different type of creativity, in which important new discoveries emerge gradually and incrementally from the extended explorations of older experimental innovators.......The single year from with Paul Cézanne’s work is most frequently illustrated in textbooks of art history is 1906 – the last year of his life, when he was 67."
Feb 22nd 2020
EXTRACT: "As our global population is projected to live longer than ever before, it’s important that we find ways of helping people live healthier for longer. Exercise and diet are often cited as the best ways of maintaining good health well into our twilight years. But recently, research has also started to look at the role our gut – specifically our microbiome – plays in how we age."
Feb 16th 2020
EXTRACT: "In an increasingly polarised political landscape, we see differing political views challenged, not through debate and discussion, but through tribal behaviour. We often consider the groups that we belong to as worthy of empathy, respect and tolerance – but not others. What’s more, recent research has identified that we reward our leaders for being naysayers – negating, refuting or criticising others – rather than empowering them."
Feb 14th 2020
EXTRACT: "All of which is to say that the Communist Manifesto is not a historical relic of a bygone era, an era of which many would like to think we have washed our hands. As long as workers’ rights are trampled on, and children are pressed into wretched servitude; as long as real wages stagnate, so that economic inequality continues to grow, allowing wealth to be ever more concentrated in the hands of the few – then the Communist Manifesto will continue to resonate and we will hear the clarion call of workers of the world to unite, “for they have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” "
Feb 4th 2020
EXTRACTS: "In my many visits to Michael’s studio I have had the opportunity to observe his process up close and over time.............."Armageddon Yacht (2019)". The name is derived from a term that US sailors use for an aircraft carrier. Power and violence are recurring themes in Anderson’s work – and no less here. With irony and wit he questions our contemporary assumptions and illusions about power. The central image of three models sipping martinis on a yacht presents us with an idealized vision of Western luxury and decadence, privilege and wealth."
Jan 23rd 2020
EXTRACT: " For the first time in over two decades a painting by Marc Chagall will be going up for auction in Israel. Tiroche Auction House will be hosting the Israeli & International Art auction on January 25th – featuring paintings by a number of Israeli masters, including Reuben Rubin, and Yosl Bergner. The highlight of the evening however is Chagall’s Jacob’s Ladder (1970-1974), a theme to which the artist would return at least a dozen times in paintings and drawings."
Jan 16th 2020
EXTRACT: "Between 1940 and 1942 Charlotte Salomon, a young German-Jewish artist, created a sequence of 784 paintings while hiding from the Nazi authorities. She gave the sequence a single title: Leben? oder Theater? (Life? or Theatre?). Viewed in the 21st century, Salomon’s artwork could be considered a precursor to the contemporary graphic novel, creating a complex web of narratives through words and images."
Jan 9th 2020
EXTRACT: "It’s simply not possible to do justice to the value of Iran’s cultural heritage – it’s a rich and noble history that has had a fundamental impact on the world through art, architecture, poetry, in science and technology, medicine, philosophy and engineering. The Iranian people are intensely aware – and rightly proud of – their Persian heritage. The archaeological legacy left by the civilisations of ancient and medieval Iran extend from the Mediterranean Sea to India and ranges across four millennia from the Bronze age (3rd millennium BC) to the glorious age of classical Islam and the magnificent medieval cities of Isfahan and Shiraz that thrived in the 9th-12th centuries AD, and beyond."
Jan 9th 2020
EXTRACT: "Lautrec had a genius for representing people. He would rarely paint any other subject. When he looked at a person who caught his interest, not only their appearance, but seemingly also their personality would magically flow from his hand, fixing a moment of their life, and his, on a piece of cardboard or canvas."
Jan 7th 2020
EXTRACT: "In 2010, Great Britain generated 75% of its electricity from coal and natural gas. But by the end of the decade*, these fossil fuels accounted for just 40%, with coal generation collapsing from the decade’s peak of 41% in 2012 to under 2% in 2019. The near disappearance of coal power – the second most prevalent source in 2010 – underpinned a remarkable transformation of Britain’s electricity generation over the last decade, meaning Britain now has the cleanest electrical supply it has ever had. Second place now belongs to wind power, which supplied almost 21% of the country’s electrical demand in 2019, up from 3% in 2010. As at the start of the decade, natural gas provided the largest share of Britain’s electricity in 2019 at 38%, compared with 47% in 2010."
Jan 5th 2020
EXTRACT: "Owing to these positive developments, many were lulled into thinking that modern advanced economies can run on autopilot. And yet economists knew that market capitalism does not automatically self-correct for adverse distributional trends (both secular and transitional), especially extreme ones. Public policies and government services and investments have a critical role to play. But in many places, these have been either non-existent or insufficient. The result has been a durable pattern of unequal opportunity that is contributing to the polarization of many societies. This deepening divide has a negative spillover effect on politics, governance, and policymaking, and now appears to be hampering our ability to address major issues, including the sustainability challenge."
Jan 2nd 2020
In September 2018, Ian Buruma was forced out as editor of The New York Review of Books, following an outcry over the magazine’s publication of a controversial essay about #MeToo. A year later, in a conversation with Svenska Dagbladet US correspondent Malin Ekman, he reflects on lost assignments, literature, cancel culture, threats to freedom of speech, and the state of liberal democracy.
Dec 31st 2019
EXTRACT: "I have long been troubled by the way so many believing Christians in the West have either been ignorant of or turned their backs on the plight of Palestinians, both Christian and Muslim. Right​-wing Evangelicals, under the sway of heretical theology, are so blinded by their obsession with Israel that they can't see Israel's victims. Other Western Christians simply just don't know or about the people of Palestine. I find this state of affairs to always distressing, but especially so at Christmas time, since the Christmas story we celebrate not only took place in that land, it continues to define the lives of the Palestinians who live in places like Bethlehem and Nazareth. "
Dec 19th 2019
EXTRACT: "Although there have long been farmers and merchants who specialised in growing and selling seeds, it wasn’t until the 20th century that people started talking about seed production as an industrial process. Thanks to changes in farming, science and government regulations, most of the “elite” seed that is bought and sold around the world today is mass produced and mass marketed — by just four transnational corporations."
Dec 14th 2019
EXTRACT: "Dehydration is associated with a higher risk of ill health in older people, from having an infection, a fall or being admitted to hospital. But an appetite for food and drink can diminish as people age, so older people should drink regularly, even when they’re not thirsty. Older women who don’t have to restrict their fluid intake for medical reasons, such as heart or kidney problems, are advised to drink eight glasses a day. For older men, it’s ten glasses."
Dec 12th 2019
EXTRACT: "A decade ago, I wrote The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty. This month, a fully revised Tenth Anniversary edition was published, and is available, free, as an eBook and audiobook. The chapters of the audiobook are read by celebrities, including Paul Simon, Kristen Bell, Stephen Fry, Natalia Vodianova, Shabana Azmi, and Nicholas D’Agosto. Revising the book has led me to reflect on the impact it has had, while the research involved in updating it has made me focus on what has changed over the past ten years"
Nov 27th 2019
EXTRACT: "Jay Willis at GQ reports that Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said on Fox and Friends that Trump is God’s Chosen One. He said he told Trump, “If you’re a believing Christian, you understand God’s plan for the people who rule and judge over us on this planet and our government.” Perry also said that he had written a memo for Trump about how God uses imperfect people, comparing Trump to biblical figures such as Solomon, Saul and David, who were also flawed. This evangelical discourse that a providential God controls political power goes back to old West Semitic Religion"
Nov 7th 2019
Extract: "The PSA test is done using a small amount of blood to detect raised levels of prostate specific antigen (PSA). Yet, despite its relatively low cost and ease of administering, it is not offered for routine screening in many countries, including the UK. This is because a significant proportion of those testing positive have no disease (a false-positive result), slow-growing cancer that doesn’t need treatment, or positive results caused by a relatively benign condition, such as a urinary tract infection. Detecting prostate cancer early is important and saves lives. But many of those identified by the PSA test as having elevated levels of the antigen could potentially undergo painful treatment with significant life-altering side effects, which were unnecessary. Also, up to 15% of men with prostate cancer have normal PSA levels (a false-negative result), meaning that many men would receive unwarranted reassurance from this test. Guidelines in most countries, therefore, note that the possible benefits of testing are outweighed by the potential harms of over-diagnosis and over-treatment, making it unsuitable for screening everyone."