Paint Books

A beautifully written book about how God's faithfullness works in our lives. An easy read that's both inspiring and enlightening.

It is a very encouraging book and it proves that true love does exist! It highlights the need for GOD to be first in any healthy relationship. I love it!

It seems that behind every sad song is a sad story. Behind an inspiring song is an inspiring story. Behind the song "Mommy Paints the Sky," there is both. With thanksgiving but sadness in his heart, Danny Oertli wrote a song for his daughter. "As the sun lays down to sleep / You ask me why she's gone / I don't know where to start / As the sunset lights your face / I see God knows how to heal little hearts."

"Gracie, Jack and I were driving down the road in my really fast Honda minivan. As we pulled into a parking space at Wal-Mart an incredible sunset began to form over the mountains. The car's interior was bathed in amber light and deep strokes of yellow criss-crossed the sky, as if drawn by an unseen hand.

"'Daddy,' came Gracie's little voice from the back seat, 'Did God let mommy paint the sky tonight?'

"Looking in the rearview mirror I saw her leaning into Jack to catch a better view. As the light from the sunset settled on their faces, I silently praised God for the healing and hope He had brought into our lives.

"For months I had been assuring Gracie and Jack that God had not forgotten us and that He loved us more than we could imagine. I had used big words like "sovereign" and "eternity," concepts even I didn't understand."

But somehow, on that night, God gave Gracie a glimpse of something that touched her little heart. He began to heal her. On a warm, November night, God used the magnificence of His creation to teach a lonely little girl a lesson her father could not - that mommy had gone to be with Jesus. God began to heal a little heart that was hurting for its mommy.

Mommy Paints the Sky is a love story: a story written by Danny Oertli, a singer, songwriter and now an author, to share the story of his life with Cyndi. He fell in love with Cyndi in high school, dated her through college and married her shortly after. But within six months of marriage they were devastated to learn that she had cancer. God saw fit to heal her and in the years that followed to bring two children to their family. But after eight years marked with both struggle and triumph, God very suddenly called Cyndi to Himself, leaving a man struggling to find hope and meaning through the pain and leaving two children wondering when mommy would come home.

This is a beautiful story and one that touched me deeply, perhaps because I have been married for a similar amount of time and have a similar family, or perhaps because the lessons Oertli learned were ones I need to learn as well. As we read about Cyndi's illness and her death, we can see Danny's growth in his understanding of those terms he claims to know so little about - sovereignty and eternity. He comes to see that God is sovereign and can do His will within His creation. He comes to see that suffering is not meaningless, but that somehow it serves a purpose. Oertli writes, in his reflection on a special passage of Scripture, that "God was teaching me to take my eyes off myself and focus on others. It would be a hard-fought battle, as everything in me wanted to pull back from people and wallow in suffering" (page 133). At the same time he learned about eternity, that it is only one short sleep past (to borrow a phrase from John Donne). God exists outside of time, so while His timing may not be ours, we have to trust that He knows best.

Oertli expresses his understanding of these great truths in "Worship You With Tears," the first song he wrote after Cyndi's death. "You know when I rise / You know when I sleep / You know I need you desperately / I pour out my soul, oh Lord / I worship you with tears / I am broken / I have nothing to give / I fall at your feet / And worship you with tears." He shows that he can worship God with tears, trusting not in knowing why God allowed this to happen, but in God's goodness, faithfulness and sovereignty. That spirit of trust pervades the book.

I'll admit that I had a few small concerns with the author's theology, primarily with several uses of the "God spoke to me" language that is all too common today. Some may say that I've allowed emotion to distract me from this seriousness of this problem (and this is an emotional book), but I feel that it did not detract seriously from the book, and to focus undue attention on it would be to miss the beauty of the story. While God may not have spoken to Gracie through the sunset, He somehow used it to touch her heart and to help her understand that mommy had gone to be with Him. I cannot argue with that.

This book encouraged me, even as one who has never experienced so painful and significant a loss. I have little doubt it will be used to touch and to heal many hurting hearts and to prepare others for the pain that is always so nearby in this fallen world. To echo the words of Jerry Bridges in his endorsement, "Mommy Paints the Sky will draw you closer to God." It will also move you to tears. A beautiful story, this is one I highly recommend. I would also recommend purchasing Danny Oertli's album Everything Inbetween as a companion, as it has recordings of many of the songs he writes about in this book. The book grows better when you can hear the songs, and the songs have more meaning once you have read the story.

This book is an endearing testimony of one man's love and respect for his father. The author shows us a glimpse of a man who believes in honoring your family, your country, and your community through actions as well as words. This book simultaneously made me proud to have been raised in a small Alabama town and sad that I have not the drive or time to honor my family in the way that the author honors his. John Graham, Sr. is the type of man we should all strive to be. I feel blessed to have had the opportunity to read this book.

The author has done what so many of us say we want to do, but never find the wherewithall to accomplish. He has preserved his own dearest memories and passed them along to others to share the joy and wisdom of them. He seems to have absorbed his boyhood like a sponge and has wrung it for our enjoyment. It is no small task to research one's family tree and portray it objectively in the community forest in which it has grown. If you are of this Appalachain and small town culture but it feels remote to you in your present circumstances, reading this book will transport you back into it. If you are not, you will learn something!

I enjoyed this book tremendously...it's not only a touching tribute to a true Southern gentleman, but it brings back memories of growing up in a simpler time and place. A revealing glimpse of life in a small town and one you'll want for your personal library.

AFTER READING THE SYNOPSIS OF THIS BOOK I WAS UNDER THE IMPRESSION I WAS BUYING A BOOK THAT WOULD BE BENIFICIAL TO THE ENTIRE PROCESS OF CONTRACT PAINTING. HOWEVER, WHILE IT SAYS THERE IS MUCH INFORMATION ON PREP WORK, THERE ISN'T. THIS BOOK IS FOR THE PAINTER WHO WANTS TO KNOW HOW TO ESTIMATE JOBS BETTER. THATS IT. SURE IT GIVES COMMON TIPS ON RESUME AND ADVERTISING, BUT DOES NOT COVER OTHER THINGS. THIS BOOK IS FOR THE PROFESSIONAL THAT ALREADY HAS CLEAR KNOWLEDGE OF HOW HIS/HER CREW CAN WORK, AND WHAT THEIR OUT PUT RATE IS BUT NEEDS TO KNOW MORE THIS BOOK CAN HELP YOU.

This is a operations management book for painting contractors. It is a very good book. But for it to be of any use, the contractor must invest time to create or change existing procedures. I would have given it five stars, but the software doesn't work. Next, I'll review McGraw-Hill's customer service operations. PS. Mr. Gleason wrote another book with data and software for estimating. I only previewed it, but it looks like a good tool.

The worthiness of this book is inside the covers not in the sticker price. It goes into depth on how to start and manage a painting business. It gives basically everything there is to know for maintaining a successful painting business. Whether a person wants to do it small or big.

I am about to start my own small painting business and I am glad I got this book. I had no idea how much there is to know for getting into this business without previous experience. I was going to fail from the very begining. This book opened my eyes. It is not just having a painting skills.

I will recommend this book to enyone that wants to get into painting business without previous experience in this field. You'll see how much more you need to know for a success on the side of possessing a good painting skills.

If you'll never done any painting you also need "Paint your home: Skills, Techniques, and Tricks of the Trade for Professional Looking Interior Painting".

This is my book, and I'm so proud of it!! Of course I recommend it to everyone, but not just 'cuz it's mine! If you enjoy art, poetry or travel, this is the book for you! With 20 different artists, 2 poets and 1 DVD, this book on the National Parks is just awesome- TRUST ME!!

I found this book through their website when looking up the Grand Canyon, and that is the best way to look at what it has to offer, because that way you get to see all of the paintings included in the book. The paintings, commissioned from 20 artists all over the United States, were apparently inspired by the poetry which describes numerous places and vistas in the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Yellowstone, and the poems and artwork appear together on the pages. It is art-directed in a very 1940's postcard format, and would make a great gift for anyone who has visited or cares deeply about any or all of these wonderful parks. The poetry and paintings are further enhanced by the inclusion of a musical DVD, an unexpected bonus.

One has to applaud an efford that combines the artistic endeavors of writing poetry, painting landscapes, and making semi-classical music. All of this is combined in a sort of table-top book plus DVD celebrating the three stars in the firmament of the National Parks system----Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite. The poetry is primarily nature-descriptive, and provides a catalyst for the 20 artists from across the nation asked to interpret the words. The artwork is uneven, some is outstanding, some is illustrative, and some is mundane. But the overall impression of the book is very positive, and worth buying for anyone who has lost their heart at one or more of these wonderful places.

This a mighty fine book it is full of very good illustrations.It is a book recommended to me by my carving instructor who has used it as referance for years.Well worth the money a trully great book for any one wishing to learn more about carving birds

This was my first real book on carving birds out of wood. This book is very easy to understand with lots of information for the beginner. Lots of pictures with step by step detailed instructions on carving, detailing, and painting 10 songbirds. Ernie covers more birds in this one book then any two books I know. GREAT BOOK, GREAT TEACHER!

Written by Roger Schroeder, this book is a summary of Ernest Muehlmatt's carving techniques that takes the reader through the steps of carving song birds using a power carver. Mr. Schroeder's writting style is difficult to get used to. He uses many un-necessary adjectives to describe the process of carving. Much of the first part of the book is devoted to reviewing Mr. Muehlmatt's personal opinions in bird carving. The reader gets a sense that Mr. Muehlmatt is quite egotistical. Nonetheless, the book does go over a few techniques useful to aquire for both carving and painting birds. Although geared toward people who use power carving tools, much of the information can be used for those who utilize knives and gouges. The second part of the book includes patterns of some common song birds and a pictorograph showing how each one was carved and painted. This turns out to be the most useful part of the book. Overall, readers will gain some knowledge of song bird carving and painting and a lot of insight into the thought process of Ernest Muehlmatt, albeit at the expense of sifting through the cumbersome writing sytle of Roger Schroeder.

I like the writing style, reminded me of Janet Evanovich in some ways. Not exactly true to Nascar procedures, but a fun read if you don't look for the flaws.

Starting out this read, we find ourselves in a campground on the infield of a race track speedway with our two main characters Ruby and her husband Glad, a retired Polish police office and several years Ruby's senior. .....Glad and Ruby are no strangers to the world of racing as Ruby's entire family has been involved in it for years. Her younger brother Bobby is planning to try his hand at qualifying to drive in The Coca Cola 600; which would really be a notch in his racing belt. However the day before his qualifying race tragedy happens at the speedway as another driver, Ricky Sanders, who also was planning to race to qualify, turns up dead and all clues seem to point to young Bobby as the soul suspect. It doesn't help matter when Detective Frishburn, who is in charge of the case, finds out there is some bad blood between Ruby, who was once Ricky's boyfriend, their families and that Ricky and Bobby swapped paint the night before in a heated argument. The fact that Bobby is hiding out from being questioned by the detective only intensifies the situation and cast more suspicision his way and Bobby is in real trouble with the law. Perhaps he is the killer!
Ruby is determined to prove her brother's innocence and enlists the help of her now retired police officer husband Glad, but with or without his help she warns him that she won't stop until Bobby's innocence is proven. Ah, now the games begin as the two of them get themselves deeper and deeper into a mystery of murder and the truth behind it that hangs as a shroud of more questions than answers surface to baffle them. Add to this the ever present presence of Detective Frishburn who is just as determined to run the investigation without their interference, and is sure Bobby is the killer, and your in for a ride on a barreling freight train heading towards the end of the tracks. The outcome is anyone's guess. I'll never tell.
Our authors, Jim and Joyce Lavene have pulled off yet another great murder mystery. Aside from all the normal 'who done it ' you have a great backdrop of racing world characters that spice up this read with just the right amount of ingredients. It was also a fun read, as Glad not only has his hands full with trying to prove Bobby's innocence but also keeping his overzealous young wife from landing them both either in the brig or dead. You'll enjoy this one; a mystery with a new twist but still full of the elements that make it what it should be.
Shirley Johnson
Senior Reviewer
MidWest Book Review

Glad and Ruby have a very good and happy marriage although he is a generation older than her. Glad retired as a detective from the Chicago PD and with his pension and sound investments has more than enough money to travel around the country following the NASCAR circuit.

They are in Concord, North Carolina to watch the Coke Cola 600 and attend the pre-event galas as her brother Bobby is one of the racers driving for the Massey team. A tragedy occurs when one of Massey's other drivers Ricky Sanders is found dead in his racing car. Bobby is the prime suspect because he is the last known person to have sent he victim alive; his prints are on the murder weapon; and his racing outfit is stained with blood. On top of the already damning evidence is the family feud between the kin of Bobby and Ricky. The police charge Bobby with the homicide that his sister and brother-in-law firmly believe he did not do as he could not hurt a fly so they look to prove that he is innocent.

SWAPPING PAINT, told in the third person from the perspective of Glad, is a madcap comedic whodunit that engages the audience due to the antics of the lead duo as he gladly prefers to watch the goings-on while she takes the wheel at speeds that NASCAR drives envy. Thus Glad's love for his take the hill spouse shines through, as he undertakes actions for her and only her. Fans of racing and mysteries will enjoy this speedy turn around the track as Joyce and Jim Lavene provide a superb racing thriller.

Harriet Klausner

This is an academic text. It reads like someone's doctoral thesis, and may have been that in an earlier incarnation. All of Hunt's major paintings are reproduced here, but in low quality on matte paper, intended only to help illuminate the text. This is a book written for and directed to an academic audience, and few others will find it useful.

WILLIAM HOLMAN HUNT: PAINTER, PAINTING, PAINT suffers from the usual maladies of post-modern academic writing. Citation and quotation substitute for genuine thought and reason. The author's psychological inability to accept any form of "truth" or "falsehood" results in a continuous, mind killing dither from position to position and theme to theme, never resting firmly enough to be pinned down. Anyone who has been through a liberal arts education in the past twenty years will understand what I mean. If you had enough of that in college, this is not the book for you. If you are working on your Ph.D on Pre-Raphaelitism, on the other hand, then this book is an essential! [but, if so, you probably know that already]

I am mystified by Jacobi's premise that Hunt's paintings are unattractive, "ugly", or aesthetically eccentric. Perhaps this is the traditional academic view and Jacobi is bound by her profession to respond to it, but Hunt's work has always been popular and considered beautiful by lay audiences. I am no art scholar, only a man among the plebeian crowd, but I find Hunt's paintings unimpeachably gorgeous. One suspects many academics' real issue with Hunt is/was not aesthetic at all, but ideological. He was one of those boring Christian-idealist types... "Oh, the horror!"

The most interesting part of the book was Jacobi's chapter on Hunt's painting materials and techniques, which any Hunt fan would enjoy.

I give this book three out of five stars, if only because it is a whole substantial volume about William Holman Hunt. There aren't enough of those. And he's my favorite.

Jacobi "attempt[s] to rationalise Hunt's problematic aesthetic." One English art writer said of the Victorian-era/pre-Raphaelite English artist Hunt's works that they "are not good-looking." "Garish," "crude," "sharp and severe" are other terms that have been applied to Hunt's paintings. Jacobi does not disagree that such descriptions apply. But seeing that Hunt was a skilled painter with technical command, was self consciousness about the subjects he chose and the style he applied, and had a sharp eye (some have said he could see the moons of Jupiter with his naked eye), she looks more deeply into Hunt's works for the psychological, cultural, and religious bases of them. Basically, the lecturer and teacher of art and visual studies at two English educational institutions finds that Hunt's "anachronistic" Christian beliefs "impelled him to test the extremities of his art against modern circumstance." Working from the mid 1800s to the first years of the 1900s, the religiously-minded Hunt experienced an ineluctable modernism to make paintings that "are not failed imaginings of a comfortable middlebrow fantasy, but successful investigations of uncomfortable, not wholly controllable, individual actuality." While Jacobi's acute, multi-sided study (as the subtitle suggests) does not presume to elevate Hunt beyond his standing as a particularly interesting nineteenth-century English artist, it does discern and clearly define challenges Hunt presents to art historians and critics; and does resolve the primary ones through extensive biographical research, historical and sociological study of the period, and expert art critic skills, understandings, and insights.

Any Art lover who enjoys looking at paintings by a Artist totally in command of his craft, should look no further then the Art of William Holman Hunt. A deeply religious man who's many paintings were inspired from the Bible. This book goes into more detail about Hunt's private life then any other I have ever read, but it's the reproduced paintings that make this book stand out for me.
As the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words,in this case how true.
Just one example of a painting which amply demonstrates his painterly prowess is a painting from 1852 called, "Our English Coasts" check out the light on the grass in the background and the sunlight shining through the ear of the sheep close'st to the front of the painting.
Truly Outstanding.
If you enjoy paintings by Hunt you may also like other members of the P.R.B. namely Ford Madox Brown and John Everett Millais.
I can assure you, you will not be disappointed.

I can't count how many times I've used this book to research foundation paint lines. I find it invaluable if you are looking to research your pedigrees. Photos are color and very good. Highly recommended for any paint horse owner - learn the history of your paint horse breed.

A good reference on some of the foundation paint horses and their roots. Some pictures are labled incorectly (tobiano vs overo). Good information on Painted Robin and Mr Jae Bar. Not current on the newer sires impacting the breed.

This is one of the best books I've encountered on decorative paint effects.Sloan has a background in decorating and restoring old houses and is familiar with all the "authentic" techniques used to achieve certain effects, which inspires confidence in her instructions.

Photos of the effects and pitfalls you may encounter give the instructions much more clarity than most of the books on the subject.

The book is truely useful and lives up to the subtitle "a Practical Guide"

Truly one of my favorite books on my shelf. Annie provides lovely illustrations and simple instructions to guide you through basic and more detailed techniques Great project ideas too!

This is a really neat book written from a Dog's point of view. It is not "fluff" as the other reviewer thinks, it is a cleverly written source of information on how to select and care for and train a dog. This is told from the dog's point of view so that the dog is selecting and training the human. Dog and human behavior, like dog-dog and dog-human interactions, are described. If everyone's dog and human learned these things, the world would be a better place for all of us! How many times have you have someone's dog jump on you or go after your dog, not to mention humans in cities who don't pick up their dog's poos. If all dog owners learned from this book, dogs and people would be much better off. A really good and funny book! Excellent subtle and humorous tips for dog owners!

this book was cute, fluffy and not too substance-heavy...just what i expected. that said, it was cleverly written from a dog's perspective and made a great gift for my dog-obsessed mom. great gift for a dog lover with a sense of humor