Art Fundamentals: Theory and Practice


Otto G. Ocvirk - 1981
    This eleventh edition has been carefully revised to expand and clarify concepts throughout the text, while adding new material on developing ideas, critical thinking, and time and motion.

Ed Emberley's Drawing Book: Make a World


Ed Emberley - 1972
    Emberley shows young artists how drawing simple shapes can lead to more complex renderings of objects in the world around them.

What Are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art in a Nutshell


Will Gompertz - 2012
    Rich with extraordinary tales and anecdotes, What Are You Looking At? entertains as it arms readers with the knowledge to truly understand and enjoy what it is they’re looking at.

How to Be an Artist


Jerry Saltz - 2020
    . . . This book is for the artist or non-artist, for the person who gets plain English, for the person who understands that practical talk can coax out the mystical messages that lie underneath." —Steve Martin Art has the power to change our lives. For many, becoming an artist is a lifelong dream. But how to make it happen? In How to Be an Artist, Jerry Saltz, one of the art world’s most celebrated and passionate voices, offers an indispensable handbook for creative people of all kinds. From the first sparks of inspiration—and how to pursue them without giving in to self-doubt—Saltz offers invaluable insight into what really matters to emerging artists: originality, persistence, a balance between knowledge and intuition, and that most precious of qualities, self-belief. Brimming with rules, prompts, and practical tips, How to Be an Artist gives artists new ways to break through creative blocks, get the most from materials, navigate career challenges, and above all find joy in the work.Teeming with full-color artwork from visionaries ancient and modern, this beautiful and useful book will help artists of all kinds—painters, photographers, writers, performers—realize their dreams.

The Sketchbook of Loish: Art in Progress


Lois van Baarle - 2018
    Peek inside Loish’s sketchbook and discover how she explores gesture, stylization, and sketching for animation. Learn the different techniques she uses when sketching with traditional and digital tools, and follow the book’s two detailed tutorials on character construction and sketching digitally to improve your own processes. The book also features handy quick tips for capturing movement, using different line weights, shading, and using textured brushes. Including an insight into Loish’s character sketching, development sketches, landscape, and reference studies this book will show you how Loish captures the spirit of her finished artworks in her exquisite preliminary work.In addition to showcasing a comprehensive collection of Loish’s sketches, this book features exclusive artwork, and a special chapter exploring Loish’s personal concepts to give an in-depth look at how her initial ideas evolve through sketches to culminate in her accomplished concept designs. A truly inspiring and informative book with a high-quality finish and slipcase, The Sketchbook of Loish will have you itching to get sketching!

Mechanika: Creating the Art of Science Fiction with Doug Chiang


Doug Chiang - 2008
    For generations artists have created imagery destined for the entertainment of others, and now you can too.Revered science fiction artist and film designer, Doug Chiang, reveals the thought processes and techniques he used working on blockbusters such as the Star Wars prequels, War of the Worlds, Terminator, and Beowulf. You'll learn from Chiang's visionary experience as he shares his design processes, giving expert advice and showcasing the groundbreaking style that has earned his creations a spot in the Brooklyn Museum, Houston Museum of Fine Art and the Tokyo National Museum.Inside you'll discover:30+ lessons for creating out-of-this-world science fiction scenes in the style featured in films, books, comics, toys and games using both traditional and digital techniquesDetails and tips for using Adobe Photoshop to conceive, design, draw and enhance your creations25 step-by-step demonstrations of outrageous robots, vehicles, creatures and environments with finished color imagesForeword by film producer/director Robert Zemeckis (Monster House, The Polar Express, Back to the Future, Beowulf)With tips on everything from basic skills like blueline sketching and assembling a toolkit to conceptualization and painting for digital art, Mechanika has everything you need to get great results and make your science fiction worlds come alive!

Threadless: Ten Years of T-shirts from the World's Most Inspiring Online Design Community


Jake Nickell - 2010
    It pioneered the online business model of crowd-sourced or community-driven design, in which people submit designs that are voted on by the site’s 1 million users and printed. Over the past 10 years, the company has amassed a vast archive of very cool, very hip, and often very entertaining designs, and Threadless is a spectacular showcase of 400 of the very best T-shirts created by the community—a barometer of art and design over the past decade.   Much more than a book of extraordinary graphics, Threadless tells the extremely interesting story that inspired Inc. magazine to hail Threadless.com as “the most innovative small company in America.” There are also profiles of individual designers and “think pieces” from influential admirers, including design guru John Maeda, Jeff Howe of Wired, and bestselling business/marketing writer Seth Godin.Praise for Threadless:"If you page through this book, you'll see example after example of love, art, and joy." -Seth Godin, author of twelve international bestsellers "With its message of passion, creativity and fearlessness, the Threadless book is more than just a visually stimulating flip-through. Its 224 pages of design, artwork, and creativity make for an inspirational read for any entrepreneurial start-up." -Coolhunting.com "Page after page of awesome designs." -Wired.com "The Threadless book is a treat-more informative than an art book, less boring than a Harvard Business Review case-study, a sweet-spot between commercialism and passion, like the site itself." -Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing.net

Color: A Natural History of the Palette


Victoria Finlay - 2003
    Extracted from an Afghan mine, the blue “ultramarine” paint used by Michelangelo was so expensive he couldn’t afford to buy it himself. Since ancient times, carmine red—still found in lipsticks and Cherry Coke today—has come from the blood of insects.

The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher


Bruno Ernst - 1976
    Escher, I am absolutely crazy about your work. In your print Reptiles you have given such a striking illustration of reincarnation.' I replied, 'Madame, if that's the way you see it, so be it, '" An engagingly sly comment by the renowned Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972)--the complex ambiguities of whose work leave hasty or single-minded interpretations far behind. Long before the first computer-generated 3-D images were thrilling the public, Escher was a master of the third dimension. His lithograph "Magic Mirror" dates as far back as 1946. In taking that title for this book, mathematician Bruno Ernst is stressing the magic spell Escher's work invariably casts on those who see it. Ernst visited Escher every week for a year, systematically talking through his entire oeuvre with him. Their discussions resulted in a friendship that gave Ernst intimate access to the life and conceptual world of Escher. Ernst's account was meticulously scrutinized and made accurate by the artist himself. Escher's work refuses to be pigeonholed. Scientific, psychological, or aesthetic criteria alone cannot do it justice. The questions remain. Why did he create the pictures? How did he construct them? What preliminary studies were necessary before he could arrive at the final version? And how are the various images Escher created interrelated? This book, complete with biographical data, 250 illustrations, and explications of mathematical problems, offers answers to these and many other questions, and is an authentic source text of the first order.

Morpho: Anatomy for Artists


Michel Lauricella - 2017
    In more than 1000 illustrations, the human body is shown from a new perspective—from bone structure to musculature, from anatomical detail to the body in motion. Morpho is a rich, fascinating, and helpful book that can go with you everywhere on your sketching journey.

The Art Nouveau Style Book of Alphonse Mucha


Alphonse Mucha - 1980
    Among graphic artists and commercial designers, Mucha is praised for the innovative style books that pioneered the use of Art Nouveau in commercial packaging, design, and ornament.The most important of these style books was Documents Décoratifs, published in 1901 at the height of Mucha's fame as the high priest of the Art Nouveau movement. While the artist's fame rests largely on his posters, it is in the smaller works of the style books, or design portfolios, that the refinement of his technique can best be appreciated. The present volume, carefully reproduced from an extremely rare and valuable set of originals, contains all 72 plates of the Documents Décoratifs portfolio. Included are designs for jewelry, wallpaper, stained glass, furniture, and tableware; figure and botanical studies; and a selection of Mucha's famous panneaux décoratifs. Eighteen of the plates are in full color, while the remaining 54 are reproduced in two or more color tones.In addition to numerous innovative designs for practical and decorative objects, the elegant draftsmanship and meticulous execution that characterized all of Mucha's work is evident in studies of langorous nudes, portrait sketches, delicately rendered plant and animal motifs, exquisite modeling of drapery and cloth, and the flowing, fantastic forms created as experiments in pure design. In the Foreword by Gabriel Mourey, specially translated for this edition, Mucha's own philosophy of art, and the relation of the Documents to the rest of his work, receive an appreciative and informative discussion.Hitherto available only in scattered sources, or in the libraries of wealthy collectors, the complete Documents Décoratifs is now available in this inexpensive one-volume edition. Lovers of Mucha's work, admirers of Art Nouveau, and the application of that style to the decorative arts, will want to own this fine royalty-free collection by one of the greatest masters of the technique."[Documents Décoratifs is] . . . an encyclopedic source for Mucha's style in every branch of decorative and applied art and one of the few books on design where even individual plates are sought after by collectors." — Marina Henderson, The Graphic Style of Alphonse Mucha

Bridgman's Life Drawing


George B. Bridgman - 1971
    To draw the figure, the artist must "have an idea of what the figure to be drawn is doing" — he must "sense the nature and condition of the action, or inaction." In this book, Mr. Bridgman, who for nearly 50 years lectured and taught at the Art Students League of New York, explains in non-technical terms and illustrations in hundreds of finely rendered anatomical drawings how best to find the vitalizing forces in human forms and how best to realize them in drawing.Mr. Bridgman begins by examining movement. After abstracting the main masses of the body — head, chest, and hips — into their rough geometrical equivalents, he gives complete instructions for building a simple model which mounts these masses on wire. By manipulating this scale model, the student may observe how these masses move in space and into what relationships such movement brings them.Once the student understands how the human form moves, the author tackles the actual problems of drawing the human figure in motion. He first covers simple drawing and building of the figure, then balance, rhythm, turning or twisting, wedging, passing and locking, and the more complex relationship of the masses — distribution, light and shade, mouldings (concave and convex), proportion and how to measure it, and movable masses. From here instruction turns to specific areas of the anatomy; the head and features, including the neck; the torso, front and back views; the abdominal arch; the shoulder girdle; the upper limbs, hands, and fingers; and the lower limbs, thigh and leg, knee, and finally foot. Every point of instruction and principle is illustrated in one of nearly 500 of Mr. Bridgman's own "life" drawings.There is no student nor serious artist, either amateur or professional, who cannot profit greatly from Bridgman's instruction. Like his famous anatomy course at the Art Students League, it is likely to vitalize your work with the human form.

Your Inner Critic Is a Big Jerk: And Other Truths About Being Creative


Danielle Krysa - 2016
    Silencing that stifling voice once and for all, this salve for creatives introduces ten truths they must face in order to defeat self-doubt. Each encouraging chapter deconstructs a pivotal moment on the path to success—fear of the blank page, the dangers of jealousy, sharing work with others—and explains how to navigate roadblock. Packed with helpful anecdotes, thoughts from successful creatives, and practical exercises gleaned from Danielle Krysa's years of working with professional and aspiring artists—plus riotously apt illustrations from art world darling Martha Rich—this book arms readers with the most essential tool for their toolbox: the confidence they need to get down to business and make good work.

The Elements of Drawing


John Ruskin - 1857
    The exercises become more difficult, developing greater and greater skills until Ruskin feels his reader is ready for watercolors and finally composition, which he treats in detail as to the laws of principality, repetition, continuity, curvature, radiation, contrast, interchange, consistency, and harmony. All along the way, Ruskin explains, in plain, clear language, the artistic and craftsmanlike reasons behind his practical advice — underlying which, of course, is Ruskin's brilliant philosophy of honest, naturally observed art which has so much affected our aesthetic. Three full-page plates and 48 woodcuts and diagrams (the latter from drawings by the author) show the student what the text describes. An appendix devotes many pages to the art works which may be studied with profit.

How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way


Stan Lee - 1977
    Stan Lee, the Mighty Man from Marvel, and John Buscema, active and adventuresome artist behind the Silver Surfer, Conan the Barbarian, the Mighty Thor and Spider-Man, have collaborated on this comics compendium: an encyclopedia of information for creating your own superhero comic strips. Using artwork from Marvel comics as primary examples, Buscema graphically illustrates the hitherto mysterious methods of comic art. Stan Lee’s pithy prose gives able assistance and advice to the apprentice artist. Bursting with Buscema’s magnificent illustrations and Lee’s laudable word-magic, How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way belongs in the library of everyone who has ever wanted to illustrate his or her own comic strip.