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I figured I would post up a quick review of the P3 painting DVD.

Although I had some experience painting, I was just slapping paint onto plastic. Now I know what I am doing, and why.

My family and I watched it together. My wife thought it was excellent, and had superb production values, and indeed it does. She was very impressed, and frankly that's rare. My 8 year old son has a good solid grasp on the basics and will end up an excellent painter some day.

I will confess that I was fearful that it was going to be an advertisement for P3 products - happily that was not the case at all. Of course P3 products were used (duh) but it wasn't in your face and crass, if that makes sense.

It starts at ground zero, and assumes no knowledge. Believe it or not, this is actually much harder to do than it sounds; as experts people tend to overlook minor details that are obvious to them but a newbie would genuinely miss. Techniques are clear, the camera work is sharp and not jerky, and things like using blu-tack for pinning is very clearly explained. The narration is clear and the painter works smoothly, and paints 3 different figures from start to finish. The only meaningful critique I have is that it was only an hour long. I would have liked to see more figures.

If you have some experience painting and know what your are doing and why, then frankly there isn't alot to learn here. But then again, this video is aimed at rookie painters, so an advanced painter isn't really the target for this product anyways. So is it worth it versus youtube videos? In my opinion, yes because it makes it easy and has stellar production values. Buy the DVD, put it in, watch it. No searching youtube and hoping you get the right tutorial. The $25 the video cost me is worth it simply for knowing that I am going to get a quality product that will do exactly what I want it to do.

Bottom line is 4 out of 5 stars.

As an aside, my wife and I home-school. We both feel that this is an excellent product for homeschoolers to use to teach art and painting skills. We suggested it to a few other families and they thought it was a fantastic idea.