David Brody

The Teavangelicals is a one-of-a-kind book chock-full of original reporting from the 2012 presidential race with an up-close look at how evangelicals and the Tea Party are plotting strategy to reclaim America. In his trademark breezy, funny, and engaging style, David Brody takes you inside the blossoming Teavangelical movement and describes how it is having a major effect on today's politics with an eye on dominating the political affairs of tomorrow....

Before creating a brunaille based on Norman Lundin's Simple Still Life-Three Cups, you'll learn how to transfer the cartoon files to your surface, as well as options for using the grid system to scale up or down. You'll visually take the painting apart to carefully identify the work's shapes, and then use your value chart to guide you through the painting process.

All painters would love to find a medium that would cause the exact result they want with no negative effects. Instead, it's all about compromise. Learn about the pros and cons of linseed oil, oil of rosemary, odorless mineral spirits, hydrocarbon resins, balsams, yellow beeswax, and more. You'll experiment with making damar varnish and find recipes for numerous others.

With the goal of painting grisailles and brunailles-paintings executed entirely in shades of gray or brown, respectively-you'll learn a step-by-step method for developing two appropriate value scales. In the process, you'll explore paint mixing, assessing the value of those mixtures, identifying and correcting mistakes, and understanding the effects of simultaneous contrast.

Painting a study based on Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's Bridge on the San at Mâcon-with its palpable illusion of light and air-gives you the opportunity to work with a greater depth of space than in any previous painting in this course and with brush strokes you haven't used before. You'll be challenged also by using his double complementary palette.

With step-by-step instructions, you'll build your own flexible support, starting with purchasing the supports and linen, and then stretching the linen over the frame. To create the needed barrier between the textile and the paint, you'll make a rabbit-hide glue solution and then prime with a lead white ground. You'll also learn a great variety of options for future experiments.

Examine the limited palettes used by some of the great masters throughout history-monochrome, dominant hue, analogous, split complementary, and more-and explore how they strategized color usage to create a particular mood in a painting. You'll build your own palette as you explore an exercise on color mixing, trying to match your paints to a specific color on a print.

In this lecture, you'll paint a study based on a Fairfield Porter self-portrait. Porter focused on observational figure painting with works that relied on strong abstract shape relationships. In this painting, you'll work with opacity and density as you create all the large and small, positive and negative shapes that come together as a type of grid of interlocking puzzle pieces.

Learn how to develop and work with an armature, the structure that determines the organization of elements in your painting and guides the viewer's eyes through your work. Whether it's the placement of a large figure or the angle of a hairline, generations of artists from diverse cultures have depended on the armature to bring visual power into their works.

In this lesson, you'll study Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and Munch's The Scream. While viewers often think the Munch was painted in a moment of emotional outburst, both paintings were highly premeditated and meticulously created with numerous advanced studies. By examining the many steps these painters went through in preparation, you will improve your own artistic process as well.