Paint Figures Better: 55 Pieces of Potentially Bad and Conflicting Advice on How to Suck Less at Painting Figures by Working Hard for a Long Time
Do you struggle to paint figures? Me too.
This book contains the most important lessons, tools, and actions that will help you overcome your barriers and finally learn to paint figures better. They worked for me and I bet they’ll work for you.
This book isn’t going to teach you how to draw or paint figures. It isn’t a series of tutorials, anatomy diagrams, or paint by numbers.
Instead, it’s a collection of 55 tips that will help you learn faster and more effectively. Some of these are fairly common sense. Others are a lot less common. And a few go directly opposite to how most people study figures.
The book is over 200 pages and is packed with art that I made to learn figure painting and is there to help guide or inspire you in your studies.
My journey from bad to good
I became a professional artist because of my landscape paintings. But when I dared to bring figures into my work, people gave me a hard time. My figure paintings were never as good as my landscapes and that was pretty obvious to everyone.
My landscape skills earned me a large audience and I felt like I couldn’t practice figures without a lot of people seeing me struggle. I was paralyzed by the pressure to keep performing at a high level. So I kept painting landscapes.
After years of putting it off, I bit the bullet and vowed to get my figures up to snuff, criticism be damned. It’s taken a couple years but I’m pretty amazed by how much I’ve improved.
I think it’s fair to say that figures never came easy for me. Landscapes made sense to me but figures took a hell of a long time and a lot of dedication. I think that puts me in a unique position to help those who also struggle to paint figures well.
Digital Deluxe Edition: process videos and high res files
In addition to the book you can get the deluxe package which has some extra perks for those interested in my figure & portrait painting process and thoughts.
- 🧾 Ebook (pdf, epub, and mobi)
- 🎬 How I Paint Figures - Narrated Figure Painting Process Video (1:34:29)
- 🎬 How I Paint Portraits - Narrated Portrait Painting Process Video (1:32:26)
- 🎨 217 High-res files from my figure & portrait studies