Expert watercolorist, illustrator, instructor, and co-founder of Urban Sketchers Montreal Shari Blaukopf shares her essential color tips about color-water ratio, achieving bold color, avoiding muddy washes, painting in layers, and using wet-in-wet techniques. This essential handbook covers:supplies and materialssample color palettescolor mixingusing limited palettesmonochrome sketchesthe power of complementary colorsusing evocative, expressive color  With a focus on using watercolor with greater confidence and knowledge, the book also delves into pencil and ink and water-soluble pencils.   The instructional text is enhanced with stunning watercolor illustrations by the author and other expert urban sketchers from beautiful locations around the globe. The illustrations include examples of color swatches showing value; mixing; illustrations of complementary, analogous, and neutral color schemes; and sample galleries.Working with Color is an indispensable guide for on-location artists looking to expand and strengthen their expressive use of color.

    Illustrator, architect, and international workshop instructor and Urban Sketcher Stephanie Bower has collected 101 of her best insider drawing tips, hacks, and techniques and shares them in this fully illustrated, portable book. Learn shortcuts to getting your perspective right, determining your composition, and balancing your light and shadow. This book collects many basic drawing techniques into one handy volume:How to draw a great lineUsing ellipses to draw archesHow towers are like wedding cakesThe importance of your eye level line in sketchingand 97 things more!The book also features beautiful example illustrations from Urban Sketchers around the globe! Whether you are new to sketching or are an experienced artist, this book is chock-full of useful, practical, and clever tips to take your drawing to the next level. The Urban Sketching Handbook series offers location artists expert instruction on creative techniques, on-location tips and advice, and an abundance of visual inspiration. These handy references come in a compact, easy-to-carry format—perfect to toss in your backpack or artist’s tote.

    By day six of a big trip, people are struggling to recall what happened on days three, four, and five. They return home with mostly empty journals, or bland writing that fails to capture the full spirit of their journeys. Award-winning travel humorist Dave Fox comes to the rescue in this book that's both informative and irreverently funny. You'll learn to: Bring destinations to life with bold details. Splash those details quickly onto your pages so journaling doesn't gobble up your precious vacation time. Elude your Inner Censor and write with confidence. Weave together your outer and inner journeys, using unfamiliar places as a backdrop for self-discovery. Dave shares his favorite journaling techniques, shows how to find time to write in the middle of an exciting trip, and infuses it all with a generous dose of his off-the-wall humor. Whether your journeys are weekend road trips or excursions around the world, this book will help transform you into a travel journaling superhero!

    Complemented with more than 40 full-colour personal illustrations of the Captain, Life in the Skies will be a valuable and useful guide for air travellers and budding-pilots alike!Captain Lim Khoy Hing is an ex-airline pilot who is passionate about flying, having worked all his life high above the clouds since leaving college. Prior to his retirement from flag-carrier Malaysia Airlines, he was fortunate enough to fly the latest fly-by-wire planes such as the Boeing 777 and Airbus A320, A330 and A340. He has logged a total of 25,500 flying hours, or about 20 trips to the moon and back. Capt. Lim started his flying career in the Royal Malaysian Air Force, having been trained by the Royal Air Force in the United Kingdom in 1967. He served for about 12 years in the service before joining Malaysia Airlines and finished his career with the carrier AirAsia before retiring in 2011.

    After eight years of owning their barge, Hennie-Ha, eight years involving catastrophe and crisis, Val and her partner finally go 'faring' to France for the first time. This travelogue is about the places they visit and the people they meet along the canals on their route from the Netherlands, through Belgium and into northern France. It tells a gentle story about how they experience their life on board during the four weeks they spent cruising. Written as a journal, it follows them on their travels through rain and shine and reveals how day by day, Val learns to cast aside the stresses and demands of her job and to appreciate life's simplest of pleasures to the full. And why 'Faring to France on a Shoe'? Well, download a sample and then all will be clear, or just have a 'look inside'!

    "Alert and intuitive."--The Washington Post. Author readings.

    Lipstick Traces tells a story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself. Hip, metaphorical and allusive...--Gail Caldwell, Boston Sunday Globe. Full-color illustrations and halftones.

    Now in its twentieth edition, the MOONLIGHT CHRONICLES has brought Dan's creed of "truth, beauty, and really big sabbaticals from the convention of life" to thousands across the countryWith such a following, Dan figured it was time to collect his offbeat observations into book form in hopes of inspiring other would-be journal writers to take pen, camera, and brush in hand. As Dan is fond of noting "Seems there's tons of empty journal books, but not too many on how to fill 'em up!" In HOW TO MAKE A JOURNAL, Dan answers the call, teaching readers how to tap into those pent-up creative juices and collect their life experiences on paper.

    In his paintings, leaves are lips, baguettes are noses, the right side is never up, and the upside is never down. Award-winning author Klaas Verplancke mashes everyday objects and words together in ways that are guaranteed to make kids laugh and think. René Magritte (Belgian, 1898–1967), one of the world’s most beloved artists, created whimsical, subversive paintings that helped launch the popularity of surrealism. His works combined words and images in novel, thought-provoking ways, and used humor and ordinary subjects to inspire viewers to question the world around them.

    Policeman-turned-detective-turned-writer A Yi describes life as a provincial gumshoe in China. Physician Siddhartha Mukherjee visits a government hospital in New Delhi, where he meets Madha Sengupta, at the end of his life and on the frontiers of medicine. Robert Macfarlane explores the limestone world beneath the Peak District. And Haruki Murakami revisits his walk to Kobe in the aftermath of the 1995 earthquake.In this issue--which includes poems by Charles Simic and Ellen Bryant Voigt, a story by Miroslav Penkov, and non-fiction by David Searcy, Teju Cole, and Hector Abad--GRANTA presents a panoramic view of our shared landscape and investigates our motivations for exploring it. One’s destination is never a place,” Henry Miller wrote, but a new way of seeing things.”

    French of Family Affair) "singing" songs by Bob Dylan, and tons more

    In this, we are rich. We begin with abundance. But while much is written about our city these hard days, it is typically meant to explain Detroit to those who live elsewhere. Much of this writing is brilliant, but our anthology, this anthology, is different: it is a collection of Detroit stories for Detroiters. Through essays, photographs, poetry, and art, this anthology collects the stories we tell each other over late nights at the pub and long afternoons on the porch. We share them in coffee shops, at church social hours, in living rooms, and while waiting for the bus. These are stories addressed to the rhetorical “you”—with the ratcheted up language that comes with it—and these are stories that took real legwork to investigate. We may be lifelong residents, newcomers, or former Detroiters; we may be activists, workers, teachers, artists, healers, or students. But a common undercurrent alights our work that is collected here: we are a city moving through the fire of transformation. We are afire.Featuring essays, photographs, poetry, and art by Terry Blackhawk, Grace Lee Boggs, John Carlisle, Desiree Cooper, dream hampton, francine j. harris, Steve Hughes, Jamaal May, Tracie McMillan, Ken Mikolowski, Marsha Music, Shaka Senghor, Thomas J. Sugrue, and many others.

    "The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things; visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality. . . ."With the same disarming force, The Power of Art propels us on an eye-opening, breathtaking odyssey, zooming in on eight extraordinary masterpieces, from Caravaggio's David and Goliath to Picasso's Guernica. Jolting us far from the comfort zone of the hushed art gallery, Schama closes in on intense make-or-break turning points in the lives of eight great artists who, under extreme stress, created something unprecedented, altering the course of art forever.The embattled heroes—Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko—each in his own resolute way, faced crisis with steadfast defiance, pitting passion and conviction against scorn and short-sightedness. The masterpieces they created challenged convention, shattered complacency, shifted awareness and changed the way we look at the world.With vivid storytelling and powerfully evocative descriptive passages, Schama explores the dynamic personalities of the artists and the spirit of the times they lived through, capturing the flamboyant theatre of bourgeois life in Amsterdam, the passion and paranoia of Revolutionary Paris, and the carnage and pathos of Civil War Spain.Most compelling of all, The Power of Art traces the extraordinary evolution of eight "eye-popping" world-class works of art. Created in a bolt of illumination, such works "tell us something about how the world is, how it is to be inside our skins, that no more prosaic source of wisdom can deliver. And when they do that, they answer, irrefutably and majestically, the nagging question of every reluctant art-conscript . . . 'OK, OK, but what's art really for?'"

    The margins sometimes spill over with hurriedly scrawled shopping lists and phone numbers. The cover may be travel-worn and the pages warped from watercolors. Open the book, and raw creativity seeps from each color and line. The intimacy and freedom on its pages are almost like being inside the artist's mind: You get a direct window into risks, lessons, mistakes, and dreams.The private worlds of these visual journals are exactly what you'll find inside An Illustrated Life. This book offers a sneak peak into the wildly creative imaginations of 50 top illustrators, designers and artists. Included are sketchbook pages from R. Crumb, Chris Ware, James Jean, James Kochalka, and many others. In addition, author Danny Gregory has interviewed each artist and shares their thoughts on living the artistic life through journaling.Watch artists—through words and images—record the world they see and craft the world as they want it to be. The pages of An Illustrated Life are sometimes startling, sometimes endearing, but always inspiring. Whether you're an illustrator, designer, or simply someone searching for inspiration, these pages will open a whole new world to you.

    But the culture and science thereby brought to Spain, including long-buried knowledge from Greece, largely forgotten during Europe’s Dark Ages, was to have an enduring impact on the country as it emerged into the modern era. In this gracefully written history, Richard Fletcher reveals the Moorish culture in all its fascinating disparity and gives us history at its best: here is vivid storytelling by a renowned scholar.