The result is You Are an Artist, a journey of creation through which you'll invent imaginary friends, sort books, declare a cause, construct a landscape, find your band, and become someone else (or at least try). Your challenge is to filter these assignments through the lens of your own experience and make art that reflects the world as you see it.You don't have to know how to draw well, stretch a canvas, or mix a paint colour that perfectly matches that of a mountain stream. This book is for anyone who wants to make art, regardless of experience level. The only materials you'll need are what you already have on hand or can source for free.You Are an Artist brings together more than 50 assignments gathered from some of the most innovative creators working today, including Sonya Clark, Michelle Grabner, The Guerrilla Girls, Fritz Haeg, Pablo Helguera, Nina Katchadourian, Toyin Ojih Odutola, J. Morgan Puett, Dread Scott, Alec Soth, Gillian Wearing, and many others.

    Those cartoons eventually led to a popular blog-gapingvoid.com-and a reputation for pithy insight and humor, in both words and pictures.MacLeod has opinions on everything from marketing to the meaning of life, but one of his main subjects is creativity. How do new ideas emerge in a cynical, risk-averse world? Where does inspiration come from? What does it take to make a living as a creative person?Ignore Everybody expands on MacLeod's sharpest insights, wittiest cartoons, and most useful advice. For example:-Selling out is harder than it looks. Diluting your product to make it more commercial will just make people like it less.-If your plan depends on you suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.-Don't try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether. There's no point trying to do the same thing as 250,000 other young hopefuls, waiting for a miracle. All existing business models are wrong. Find a new one.-The idea doesn't have to be big. It just has to be yours. The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will.After learning MacLeod's forty keys to creativity, you will be ready to unlock your own brilliance and unleash it on the world.

    Provides new insights and observations from Vogler's pioneering work in mythic structure for writers.

    Rethinking the usage guide for the twenty-first century, Pinker doesn’t carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose. In this short, cheerful, and eminently practical book, Pinker shows how writing depends on imagination, empathy, coherence, grammatical knowhow, and an ability to savor and reverse engineer the good prose of others. He replaces dogma about usage with reason and evidence, allowing writers and editors to apply the guidelines judiciously, rather than robotically, being mindful of what they are designed to accomplish. Filled with examples of great and gruesome prose, Pinker shows us how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right.

    No previous crafting experience or pricey materials are necessary--just a love of all things small!

    That is to say, for us humans who live lives of such relative security that we cultivate our strength and power more out of pride and for a sense of accomplishment than out of an absolute need to survive in the wild. The professional athlete hones his body to function well in a sports event-rather than to emerge safe from a life-or-death struggle. And even those in our military and LEO rely more on the security of their weapons and armor than on their own personal, raw power and brute strength to carry the day. There remains one environment where exuding the necessary degree of authoritative strength and power can mean the difference between life or death: the maximum security prison. In maximum security, the predator preys on the weak like we breathe air. Intimidation is the daily currency. You either become a professional victim or you develop that supreme survival strength that signals the predator to stay at bay.Paul Wade spent 19 years in hell holes like San Quentin, Angola and Marion. He entered this world a gangly, terrorized weakling and he graduated to final freedom, pound-for-pound one of the strongest humans on the planet. Paul Wade dedicated his prison life to the cultivation of that supreme survival strength. And ironically, it is in America's prisons that we can find some of the great, lost secrets of how to get immensely powerful and strong. Paul Wade mined these secrets as if his life depended on it-and of course in many ways it did.Finally free, Paul Wade pays his debt to society-not just with the horrors of his years in the hole-but with the greatest gift he could possibly give us: a priceless set of progressions that can take ANYONE who has the will from abject weakling to strength specimen extraordinaire.

    Despite a well-paying job, the author had managed to spend everything he had earned in the five years after college. The meeting with the mortgage officer was his financial epiphany. He finally got serious about managing and investing his money. Now in his early 50s, the author is debt free, owns a house free and clear, and has built a retirement portfolio that will comfortably sustain him and his wife in the coming years. This book will help people avoid the financial mistakes the author made the first few years after college.In a breezy, humorous, and conversational style, it describes a common-sense approach to spending, saving, investing, and managing your money to build wealth over time. If you are looking to get a grip on managing your money, From Ramen to Riches is for you! Silver medal winner in the 2011 Living Now Book Awards. Finalist in the 2011 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

    Your Ultimate Guide to Effortless Style", Natalie Jobity, a professional image consultant, shares with women tips, insider secrets and advice they can use immediately to learn how to dress to enhance their image so they look and feel amazing, inside and out. “Frumpy to Fabulous: Flaunting It” has step-by-step guidance on all the topics you care about: dressing to flatter your figure; determining your personal style; shopping smarter so you fill your closet with the right pieces; working with color; pulling your look together with accessories; dressing to elevate your image at work; and much more. As you read each chapter, Natalie's friendly, engaging, voice empowers you to unleash your style potential and encourages you to dare to express your fabulous. With illustrations showcasing “real” women, summarized tip lists (finding the right jeans, picking a cocktail dress and much more!), exercises and anecdotes based on Natalie's work with hundreds of women, this is a book that you will cherish and refer to time and time again. As you read, you will realize that you are in the midst of more than an image makeover. You are really being taken on a journey of transformation-- a wonderful and exhilarating experience that helps you tap into your true essence and express it by the way you dress. Natalie dishes her advice and wisdom in a down to earth and practical manner that is delivered with motivation and sass. She lets her book lead the way for the woman who is ready for her image to catch up with the rest of her life. This book is an invitation to change how the world sees you and how you see yourself, on your terms. Yes, you too can become one of those effortlessly stylish women you admire. Wherever you are on your image journey-from fashion challenged to emerging fashionista-with Natalie as your guide you will be inspired to "Flaunt It!"

    Wilcox casts away theory and looks at how pigments really work -- so artists can mix their own colors and get the most out of those greenish blues and purplish reds.

    A two-pronged task, it requires great technical skill and an intuitive eye. In both these respects, John Singer Sargent stands out as a portrait artist of major stature.Born in 1856 in Florence of American parents, Sargent showed artistic aptitude at an early age and was enrolled at the Academia delle Belle Arti in that city. Later he studied with Parisian artist Carolus Duran, acquiring the loose, painterly style for which he is renowned. International acclaim as a portrait artist came early in his life and followed him throughout his career.Sargent's portraits done in oil are well known; they appear in major museums throughout the world. A lesser-known but no less respected aspect of his oeuvre, his portrait drawings are the focus of this collection. Included here are early works in pencil and pastels, and later renderings in charcoal, a medium Sargent favored after 1910. They have been selected from both public and private collections by art historian Trevor J. Fairbrother and attest to Sargent's technical skill, versatility, and dexterity in three different mediums.In addition, these works reveal Sargent's ability to treat a diverse group of subjects; he handles the languorous beauties of the Edwardian age, members of the aristocracy, and the great literary and artistic figures of his day with equal virtuosity, capturing their characteristic mood and style. This collection includes portraits of Lord and Lady Spencer, Henry James, William Butler Yeats, Vaslav Nijimsky, Tamara Karsavina, Dame Ethel Smyth, and Jascha Heifetz.Artists, students, historians, and lovers of portraiture will appreciate this selection of drawings by Sargent. Anyone interested in trying his hand at portraiture will find this volume both instructional and inspirational.