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.

    Whether you’re an amateur artist, drawer, doodler, or sketcher, watercolor is a versatile sketching medium that’s perfect for people on the go—much like pen or pencil. Accomplished designer and illustrator Felix Scheinberger offers a solid foundation in color theory and countless lessons on all aspects of watercolor sketching, including: Fundamentals like wet-on-wet, glazes, and washes Materials and supplies to bring on your travels Little-known tips and tricks, like painting when water isn’t handy and seeking out inspiration Vibrant watercolor paintings grace each page, and light-hearted anecdotes (why do fish make great subjects to paint, you may be wondering...) make this a lively guide to the medium. With an open mind and sketchbook, you will be ready to capture the moments around you in luminous color with confidence, creativity, and ease—no matter what your skill level may be.

    Whether you're new to colored pencils or perfecting advanced techniques, you'll find the answers you need here in dozens of complete step-by-step demonstrations, including: Simple techniques for achieving amazingly realistic compositions, including layering, burnishing and underpaintingProven methods for working successfully with water-soluble colored pencilsA full range of inspiring subject matter, from flowers and animals to landscapes and still-life compositionsTips for solving common problems, fixing mistakes and taking sharp, clear reference photosExpert guidance in choosing the right materials and colors, including complete color charts from all the major manufacturersIt's all here in the "The Ultimate Guide to Colored Pencil"--the solutions and secrets you need for your own colored pencil success

    Fortunately, Simple Soldering proves that does not need to be the case. This handy how-to guide is complete in its exploration of the craft of creating soldered metal jewelry, including tools, techniques, and 20 beautiful projects that beginners and enthusiasts can make at home.Author and teacher Kate Richbourg demystifies basic soldering for any home crafter, showing how to create sophisticated, polished, and professional-looking jewelry pieces through simple soldering techniques. First, she instructs how to set up a jewelry workspace that fits the confines of your budget and living space. Detailed step-by-step instructions walk you through the basic tools and materials you need, plus how to use them. A sample chapter gives a host of introductory exercises that teach solid skills, allowing you to test these techniques on a small scale. Finally, you'll discover 20 finished projects that include earrings, pendants, rings, bracelets, and clasps that may also include bead or wire embellishment.Kate also demonstrates how to combine and layer techniques to gorgeous effect. She also examines common mistakes, shows how to correct or adapt them, and gives advice on when it’s time to start over. Most of all, having taught thousands of classes on soldering, Kate has a "you can do it!" attitude that shines through to help even the most reluctant jewelry maker fire up the torch with ease.Paired with an instructional DVD, Kate’s expert teaching skills will help projects come alive, right in your own studio.With Simple Soldering, the art of metal working one-of-a-kind jewelry is now at your fingertips.

    In 1653, the twenty-one-year-old son of an innkeeper, the artist Jan Vermeer, registered as a master painter with the city's Guild. Vermeer married well, had many children, and enjoyed a respectable local reputation as a painter until his death in 1675. But it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that his genius was widely appreciated. Today, Vermeer's thirty-five paintings are regarded as masterpieces.In Vermeer, Anthony Bailey presents a compelling portrait of Vermeer's life and character, long lost in history. Bailey re-creates the atmosphere of the times, introduces Vermeer's contemporaries, and portrays his domestic life in vibrant detail. Drawing on period documents and his own intense curiosity, Bailey sheds light on the science and artistry behind the glorious, almost mystical, paintings. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, Vermeer will stand as the classic work on Vermeer for years to come.

    Internationally famous Czech photographer Jan Saudek is no exception, and equally as uncompromising in pursuit of his own unique vision. For over four decades Saudek has created a parallel photographic universe, a two-dimensional home full of longing, peopled with the most extraordinary characters and colored by desire. The timeless strength of his hand-tinted photographs lies in their poetic compositions and their forceful?at times ribald?pictorial language, with its overtones of medieval genre pictures and Baroque mythology. Rejecting the traditional beauty in his famous nude photographs, Saudek shows the distinctively different: old women, fat women, children; real people in tableaux vivants that remind us of everything from surreal early movies to fin-de-siecle carnival nights. They exist outside time, a uniquely colored and almost mythical theater of dreams. Covering his debut in the 1950s through his lesser-known work to recent images, this dazzling collection offers us the true "velvet revolution," fertile and unsettling images from the dreams we might still have. The author: Daniela Mr?zkov?, critic and editor of the Czech magazines Revue fotografie and Fotografie-Magaz?n, is the author of sixteen books on photography published in the Czech Republic and abroad, and the curator of around fifty photography exhibitions. She has been a member of international juries, and has authored film and television documentaries on photography and photographers. She hasfollowed Jan Saudek's work since his early years and is the author of Saudek's first Czech monograph, The Theatre of Life.

    Un retrato de una artista, sobre todo una artista.(Portrait of an artist, always an artist, above all an artist.)

    You’ll discover how to draw all types of dragons using nothing but a pencil. Drawing Dragons shows how to bring to life fierce warriors and bearded ancients as well as baby hatchlings and protective mothers. It also features a special section on adding claws, scales, horns, jewels and other unique details to your dragons.Learn to draw:• Ferocious, attacking dragons•Graceful sea dragons•Fire-breathing flying dragons•Wise, thoughtful dragons

    But, you think, Learning to paint must be hard and frustrating. Not with Cathy Johnson as your teacher! Here, she makes learning to paint in watercolor fun--even easy!With Painting Watercolors, you'll learn to paint by picking up a brush and painting--not by reading about a bunch of confusing theories.Cathy tells you everything you need to begin--including:- Which tools and materials you should buy to get off to a good, affordable start - When, what, even where to paint - Explanations of watercolor terms (such as washes and puddles) - Easy and useful painting tricks--such as glazing and drybrush.Exercises help you loosen up and learn the ins and outs of putting paint on paper. Easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions show you how to paint water, believable skies, a variety of trees in different seasons and other popular elements. Plus, a dozen demonstrations show you how paintings come together, from initial sketch to final brushstrokes.With Cathy's help, you can start painting right away!

    She has published a book of essays on painting (Mysteries of the Rectangle) as well as an interdisciplinary investigation of a neurological disorder (The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves). She has given lectures on artists and theories of art at the Prado, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 2011, she delivered the thirty-ninth annual Freud Lecture in Vienna. Living, Thinking, Looking brings together thirty-two essays written between 2006 and 2011, in which the author culls insights from philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis, and literature.The book is divided into three sections: the essays in Living draw directly from Hustvedt's life; those in Thinking explore memory, emotion, and the imagination; and the pieces in Looking are about visual art. And yet, the same questions recur throughout the collection. How do we see, remember, and feel? How do we interact with other people? What does it mean to sleep, dream, and speak? What is "the self"? Hustvedt's unique synthesis of knowledge from many fields reinvigorates the much-needed dialogue between the humanities and the sciences as it deepens our understanding of an age-old riddle: What does it mean to be human?

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    For author Flora Bowley, making art and expressing herself creatively have always served as potent forms of personal evolution and holistic healing. Creative Revolution is the reader's key to unlocking the door to their own personal journey while making beautiful art.Creative Revolution is the culmination of Flora's life's work as an artist, offering guidance for others to embrace their authentic selves through paint. She has taught more than sixty workshops since she wrote her first book, Brave Intuitive Painting, and has witnessed miraculous things when people engage with the intuitive painting process. Creative Revolution is the next best thing to taking a course from Flora. Many readers and students can't help but exclaim, "This was about so much more than painting!" After reading Creative Revolution, readers will have a deeper connection to their intuition, increased confidence to make bolder choices, freedom to let go and explore various options, an understanding that everything is transformable, the trust that it will all work out in the end, and a renewed sense that creating can be fun and playful. All of this powerful transformation begins with paint. Flora has been writing and reflecting on these transformational aspects of the creative process for years. Creative Revolution is an insightful and practical guide for realizing the transformational power of fully embracing your creativity.

    Comes with an enclosed, supportive DVD-ROM The Louvre is the world's most visited art museum, with 8.5 million visitors annually, and houses the most celebrated and important paintings of all time. For the first time ever, The Louvre: All the Paintings collects all 2,981 paintings currently on display in the permanent collection in one beautifully curated volume. Organized and divided into the four main painting collections of the museum— the Italian School, the Northern School, the Spanish School, and the French School— the paintings are then presented chronologically by the artist's date of birth.Four hundred of the most iconic and significant paintings are illuminated with 300-word discussions by art historians Anja Grebe and Vincent Pomarède on the key attributes of the work, what to look for when viewing the painting, the artist's inspirations and techniques, biographical information on the artist, the artist's impact on the history of art, and more. All 2,981 paintings are fully annotated with the name of the painting and artist, the date of the work, the birth and death dates of the artist, the medium that was used, the size of the painting, the Louvre catalog number, and the room in the Louvre in which the painting is found. The DVD-ROM is easily browsable by artist, date, school, art historical genre, or location in the Louvre. This last feature allows readers to tour the Louvre and its contents room by room, as if they were actually walking through the building.

    MRM5 includes expert advice from more than 60 acknowledged leaders in their disciplines. New with the 5th Edition are special teaching sections that challenge students and seasoned staff alike with questions about the process and procedures of accessioning and caring for objects. Contains bibliography, glossary and multiple sample forms. MRM5 continues a tradition of museum publishing that began with the inaugural edition in 1958.

    Selected by Derrida from the prints and drawings department of the Louvre, the works depict blindness—fictional, historical, and biblical. From Old and New Testament scenes to the myth of Perseus and the Gorgon and the blinding of Polyphemus, Derrida uncovers in these images rich, provocative layers of interpretation. For Derrida drawing is itself blind; as an act rooted in memory and anticipation, drawing necessarily replaces one kind of seeing (direct) with another (mediated). Ultimately, he explains, the very lines which compose any drawing are themselves never fully visible to the viewer since they exist only in a tenuous state of multiple identities: as marks on a page, as indicators of a contour. Lacking a "pure" identity, the lines of a drawing summon the supplement of the word, of verbal discourse, and, in doing so, obscure the visual experience. Consequently, Derrida demonstrates, the very act of depicting a blind person undertakes multiple enactments and statements of blindness and sight. Memoirs of the Blind is both a sophisticated philosophical argument and a series of detailed readings. Derrida provides compelling insights into famous and lesser known works, interweaving analyses of texts—including Diderot's Lettres sur les aveugles, the notion of mnemonic art in Baudelaire's The Painter of Modern Life, and Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible. Along with engaging meditations on the history and philosophy of art, Derrida reveals the ways viewers approach philosophical ideas through art, and the ways art enriches philosophical reflection. An exploration of sight, representation, and art, Memoirs of the Blind extends and deepens the meditation on vision and painting presented in Truth and Painting. Readers of Derrida, both new and familiar, will profit from this powerful contribution to the study of the visual arts.