Mercurial, versatile, inexpensive, and wildly colorful, alcohol inks are one of the newest mediums to hit the art community. Pigments of Your Imagination is your essential guide for working with alcohol inks, from choosing which inks to use for each project to learning how to maximize your artistic potential with a wide variety of fascinating techniques. Using an assortment of materials and tools, learn how to work on a variety of surfaces, including paper, glass, metal, fabric, and plastic. Find inspiration for your own masterpieces in the step-by-step demos and guest artist gallery. From the beginning craftsperson to the professional artist, Pigments of Your Imagination offers a broad insight into the expansive world of alcohol inks. Explore the limits of your artistic ingenuity with alcohol inks. Jump start your creativity!

    It is illustrated throughout with clear demonstration photos, Mr. McCreight's beautifully rendered drawings, and examples of exceptional contemporary jewelry. This relaxed yet thorough introduction to the skills of metalworking is a fully revised, expanded and updated edition of Tim McCreight's popular guide for novice metalworkers. As both a fresh presentation of fundamental techniques and a portfolio of the finest contemporary design, Jewelry: Fundamentals of Metalsmithing is an instant classic in its own right.

    Today artists routinely dissolve the old boundaries of art by creating works that neither hang on walls nor adorn pedestals, and often willfully overturn conventions of aesthetic value, permanence and optical reward. Curator and educator Weintraub has researched and/or interviewed 35 prominent radical artists and here explores their common concerns, creative processes and media. Devoting one essay to each artist, Weintraub offers a primer for museum and gallery goers who may be confronting such works for the first time, discussing Andres Serrano's photo of a crucifix submerged in urine, the half ton of dirty clothes Christian Boltanski piled on a museum floor worn by children of the Holocaust, Janine Antoni's mammoth blocks of chocolate and lard, Chuck Close's computer art and David Hammon's detritus constructions.

    David Levi Strauss writes in his essay: "The constitutive facts of Francesca Woodman's life are by now well known. We know that she was born in 1958, that she began taking photographs seriously at age thirteen or fourteen and continued this involvement into her twenty-second year, building up, in this brief time, a remarkably coherent and affecting body of work. And we know that on January 19, 1981, just two and a half months before her twenty-third birthday, she took her own life, leaping from a window on the Lower East Side in Manhattan to her death". This volume, containing many unpublished images, finally allows us to discover the full body of work of this artist, created in Rhode Island, Rome, New York, MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire: self-portraits, mise-en-scenes, nudes, and deeply emotional collage-like images. They all show her intense relation with the camera and her own self, long before this kind of picture-making became fashionable.

    Whether you are printing by hand on your kitchen table or on a press in a print studio, this book gets you started and goes on to explore the myriad creative applications of linocut. It encourages you to experiment with different approaches to image making and explores new ways of thinking about how linocut can be used. Nick Morley shares his experience and specialist knowledge to make this practical guide an essential companion for everyone interested in this addictive and absorbing medium.

    In a body of work spanning over a half-century, he was variously a draughtsman, a printmaker, a sculptor and a painter. This short book is both a biography and a guide to his art. It focuses on the extraordinary works that Henri Matisse made during the last period of his life - the large-scale cut-outs on coloured paper, including his famous Blue Nudes, The Snail and Large Composition with Masks.

    Are You Up to the Challenge? With just watercolors, colored pencils, and white gouache, artist Mark Crilley takes you step-by-step through his process for producing stunning, hyperrealistic recreations of everyday items. Based on Crilley’s mega-popular “Realism Challenge” YouTube videos, The Realism Challenge contains thirty lessons demonstrating how to render mirror-like duplicates in the trompe l’oeil tradition of everything from shells, leaves, and candy bars to your very own still life arrangements. Each lesson builds off the previous one, as you’ll master essential artistic techniques like creating drop shadows, adding highlights, and building from light to dark. Learn the secrets of one of hyperrealism’s biggest stars. Come take . . . The Realism Challenge!

    The effects of the 1980s films Beat Street, Wild Style, and StyleWars are examined, as is the influence graffiti experts on today's subculture through books, magazines, and the Internet.The practical elements of graffiti are considered in later chapters, which combine tips on handling a spray can, creating a unique tag, and getting work up safely and legally with step-by-step diagrams that show how to achieve effects such as bubblestyle, blockbusters, oneliners, and wildstyle. A teacher’s manual features sample plans for a single lesson as well as guidance on structuring a longer course.

    Here you'll collect random pictures that appeal to you-images culled from periodicals or cut out of catalogs, photographs, or postcards. And here, with Sarah's encouragement, you'll reverently and reflectively assemble them into collages that reveal just about anything you might ever want to know about yourself. Your passions. Your preferences. What tickles you. What ticks you off. What makes you happy. From discovering why a certain shade of blue makes you smile, to suddenly comprehending the source of a problem in a friendship, to recognizing your deep spiritual beliefs, the nine sections of The Illustrated Discovery Journal will lead you to the hidden side of your authentic self as no other book can.

    Chapters range from Blank Canvas: It's Your World, which illuminates how to approach each day, to Bravery Tests: Challenging Yourself, which draws upon your inner strength, to Happy Little Accidents: Creating Success from Failure, which affirms the power of positive thinking.Bob Ross's lessons gently encourage everyone to live their best Bob Ross life--an aspiration more important now than ever before.

    How did the Old Masters create their masterpieces? What kind of education allowed these great artists to create such beautiful work, and how can an artist learn these lessons today? Traditional Oil Painting answers those questions and many more. This comprehensive sourcebook explores the most advanced levels of oil painting, with full information on the latest scientific discoveries. Author and distinguished artist Virgil Elliott examines the many elements that let artists take the next step in their work: mental attitude, aesthetic considerations, the importance of drawing, principles of visual reality, materials, techniques, portraiture, photographic images versus visual reality, and color. Traditional Oil Painting helps artists master the secrets of realistic painting to create work that will rival that of the masters.

    Mix and match to achieve countless variations, building layer upon layer to create unique and wonderfully complex abstract art.- Learn more than 30 step-by-step techniques for developing texture and visual interest, including collage, monoprinting, carving, color blocking, paint skins, raised stencils, glazing and so much more. - Chapters explore the phases of a multi-layered painting, from surface preparation through adding structure, developing complexity and adding finishing touches. - Follow the development of two paintings as each layer adds to the finished result, with tons of additional artwork throughout. - Gain insight on how to make paints, mediums and grounds work for you.Embracing a spirit of freedom and spontaneity, Acrylic Solutions is a stimulating guide for contemporary artists of any skill level. Beginners will learn how to make visually compelling paintings from start to finish, while more experienced artists will find the tools and inspiration to take their work to the next level.

    The quick brushstrokes of the Impressionists suited his temperament, as did his heavy use of impasto. This helpful volume shows many of van Gogh's best loved works, including the famous self-portrait with a Bandaged Ear, painted after he had cut off part of his ear in a fit of madness, Sunflowers, which were to him a symbol of power and beneficence, and The Starry Night, a painting which clearly expresses intensity and mental turbulence.

    During her increasingly long lunch breaks, she began to obsessively read the PennySaver, the iconic classifieds booklet that reached everywhere and seemed to come from nowhere. Who was the person selling the “Large leather Jacket, $10”? It seemed important to find out—or at least it was a great distraction from the screenplay.Accompanied by photographer Brigitte Sire, July crisscrossed Los Angeles to meet a random selection of PennySaver sellers, glimpsing thirteen surprisingly moving and profoundly specific realities, along the way shaping her film, and herself, in unexpected ways.Elegantly blending narrative, interviews, and photographs with July’s off-kilter honesty and deadpan humor, this is a story of procrastination and inspiration, isolation and connection, and grabbing hold of the invisible world.

    Illustrated with 100 of his paintings, the book is accompanied by an elegant biographical portrait of the artist’s life and achievements.