This is the how-to guide for becoming a better artist and a more attentive naturalist. In straightforward text complemented by step-by-step illustrations, dozens of exercises lead the hand and mind through creating accurate reproductions of plants and animals as well as landscapes, skies, and more. This book provides clear, practical advice for every step of the process for artists at every level, from the basics of choosing supplies to advanced techniques. While the book’s advice will improve the skills of already accomplished artists, the emphasis on seeing, learning, and feeling will make this book valuable—even revelatory—to anyone interested in the natural world, no matter how rudimentary their artistic abilities.Ways to use your journal to enhance curiosity, creativity, and sharpen your naturalist’s eye.Simple techniques to improve your visual memory and help you draw what you see.Lessons on how to use graphite, pen, watercolor and gouache for fast field sketches.Lessons on how to draw wildflowers, trees, mushrooms, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, landscapes, seascapes, and skies.Paperback, 8.5 x 11, 368 pages, with full-color and black-and-white illustrations throughout.

    Our lives are in constant tether to phones, to email, and to social media. In this age of distraction, the ability to experience and be present is often lost: to think and to see and to listen.Enter Rob Walker's The Art of Noticing--an inspiring volume that will help you see the world anew. Through a series of simple and playful exercises--131 of them--Walker maps ways for you to become a clearer thinker, a better listener, a more creative workplace colleague, and finally, to rediscover what really matters to you.

    Including Felicia’s personal stories and hard-won wisdom, Embrace Your Weird offers: —Entertaining and revelatory exercises that empower you to be fearless, so you can rediscover the things that bring you joy, and crack your imagination wide open —Unique techniques to vanquish enemies of creativity like: anxiety, fear, procrastination, perfectionism, criticism, and jealousy —Tips to cultivate a creative community —Space to explore and get your neurons firing Whether you enjoy writing, baking, painting, podcasting, playing music, or have yet to uncover your favorite creative outlet, Embrace Your Weird will help you unlock the power of self-expression. Get motivated. Get creative. Get weird.

    Following an overview of painting fundamentals, illustrated step-by-step instructions accompanied by lessons on specific techniques lead your way. This unique book is a complete course in acrylic painting, built up from key techniques. As you progress through the sections of the book, the author demonstrates each technique with the creation of a mini painting, measuring 5-inches squared. So by the time you have worked right through to the end, you will have an amazing collection of 50 mini paintings—on board, paper, or canvas—that will be a testament to your skill and creativity. The subject matter for these squares varies from abstracts and simple color-mixing exercises, through to figurative subjects: a flower, a sunset, a busy street scene—and many more. These can be mounted, exhibited, or simply collected in a portfolio, or given away as gifts for friends to cherish. If you are coming to acrylics for the first time, or keen to improve your skills and sometimes daunted by the thought of filling a large empty canvas or blank piece of board, this is your ideal guide. Instead, it will free you from creative hang-ups and replace them with an addictive desire to create that next 5-inch square!

    But it can also be a challenge. How do you spot a likely subject? How do you choose the person most likely to stay still? How do you draw movement for the person that refuses to sit still? "Sketching People" offers straightforward, practical help to give beginning artists the confidence and ability to draw all sorts of people in many different settings. In the pages of this book, readers will find: How to capture the essence of characterDifferent line-work stylesTechniques for creating realistic skin tonesThe key to capturing the details of street lifeWays to create fabric foldsMastering tonal drawingsConveying age differences, and moreThis clearly written, fun to read book is bursting with inspirational artwork and candid advice that will help you improve your drawing skills and change the way you sketch for the better.

    Whether scribbled in a sketch pad or on a napkin, concepts are a way for artists to develop their skills and discover interesting shapes and forms that can be developed into their next masterpiece. In Sketching from the Imagination, 50 talented traditional and digital artists have been chosen to share their sketchbook works, from doodled concept sketches to fully rendered drawings. A visually stunning collection packed full with useful tips, Sketching from the Imagination is an excellent value resource for concept design to inspire artists of all abilities.

    For those who have always wanted to or tried and failed to learn to draw it provides simple step-by-step instruction, plus easy-to-follow practice exercises, and provides the motivation and inspiration readers need to be successful. For those who already draw, Everyday Sketching and Drawing offers another technique to add to their drawing arsenal.Why do so many adults come to view drawing as difficult or fraught with anxiety? Traditional art instruction is often bogged down with jargon, rules, and admonishments that unintentionally stifle the joy of drawing for its own sake.Steven Reddy's new and easy approach to drawing instructs sketchers to document their unique and compelling lives in realistic yet playful sketches that record the places, spaces, and objects that help define them as individuals. He reminds artists to slow down, notice, and attend to the sketch-worthy scenes and subjects that are unstaged and always there in our everyday lives. He offers a versatile technique that can lead to a skill that fills sketchbooks with the visual details that differentiate one life from another. This approach is a meditative, relaxing alternative to academic concerns about perspective, proportion, and accuracy. Reddy encourages artists to capture in whimsical but detail-specific illustrations their unique, subjective interpretation of their visual surroundings.Steven Reddy's drawing method produces extremely detailed and realistic scenes of objects and scenes in everyday life in a relatively short period of time (60 minutes to 3 hours or more, depending on the sketcher's preference). Modifying a technique utilized by Old Master oil painters, the drawings pass through 5 clearly articulated stages where each step focuses on one visual concept at a time.

    They contain diary entries, rants, interviews, and stories. They can be by one person or many, found in stores, traded at comic conventions, exchanged with friends, or given away for free. Zines are not a new idea: they’ve been around for years under various names (chapbooks, flyers, pamphlets). People with independent ideas have been getting their word out since before there were printing presses.This book is for anyone who wants to create their own zine. It’s for learning tips and tricks from contributors who have been at the fore front of the zine movement. It’s for getting inspired to put thoughts and ideas down on paper. It’s for learning how to design and print your own zine so you can put it in others’ hands. Whatcha Mean, What’s a Zine? is for anyone who has something to say.

    It is an inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, quotations, images, curious facts and useless information, oddities, serious science, jokes and memories, all concerned with the interplay between the verbal and the visual, and the limitless resources of the human mind. Loosely arranged in 72 chapters, all this material is presented in a wonderfully inventive series of pages that are themselves masterly demonstrations of the expressive use of type, space, color and imagery.This book does not set out to teach lessons, but it is full of wisdom and insight collected from all over the world. Describing himself as a visual jackdaw, master designer Alan Fletcher has distilled a lifetime of experience and reflection into a brilliantly witty and inimitable exploration of such subjects as perception, color, pattern, proportion, paradox, illusion, language, alphabets, words, letters, ideas, creativity, culture, style, aesthetics and value.The Art of Looking Sideways is the ultimate guide to visual awareness, a magical compilation that will entertain and inspire all those who enjoy the interplay between word and image, and who relish the odd and the unexpected.

    Step-by-step instructions illustrate every technique.

    Bursting with color, vivid imagery, and bouts of whimsy mixed with deeply intimate insights, the sketchbooks capture the texture of personal experience in a dizzying variety of illustrative styles and layouts that run the gamut from street portraits to stream-of-consciousness doodles, comics, and pop-ups. The Sketchbook Project World Tour presents the most compelling, surprising, and visually stunning examples from this one-of-a-kind artistic treasury.

    Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers’s unique ideas of color experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience.Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten representative color studies chosen by Albers. The paperback has remained in print ever since and is one of the most influential resources on color for countless readers.This new paperback edition presents a significantly expanded selection of more than thirty color studies alongside Albers’s original unabridged text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusions of transparency and reversed grounds. Now available in a larger format and with enhanced production values, this expanded edition celebrates the unique authority of Albers’s contribution to color theory and brings the artist’s iconic study to an eager new generation of readers.

    Blogging is hot in this highly creative world—and here is the only how-to book aimed directly at them. Everyone from knitters and beaders to scrapbookers and altered artists will find the practical information and visual inspiration they need to create an artful online journal.Thanks to hundreds of gorgeous screen grabs from the very best blogs, a thorough introduction to the tools of the trade, and instructions that virtually take you by the hand, even beginners will swiftly go from blank screen to colorful, enticing pages. Those who already have a blog, but want to enhance their presence on the Web, will learn how to add banners and graphics, take the perfect shots, crop and size photos, establish links, and attract an audience of eager readers.Best of all, readers will meet some of the Web’s most popular creative bloggers, including Alicia Paulson (Posie Gets Cozy), Gabreial Wyatt (Vintage Indie), Emily Martin (Inside A Black Apple), Lidy Baars (Little French Garden House), Heather Bullard (Vintage Inspired Living), and Serena Thompson and Teri Edwards (The Farm Chicks).

    With just the simple tools around you—your imagination, basic art supplies, household objects, and natural materials—you can transform your family life, and have so much more fun! Amanda Soule has charmed many with her tales of creativity and parenting on her blog, SouleMama. Here she shares ideas and projects with the same warm tone and down-to-earth voice. Perfect for all families, the wide range of projects presented here offers ideas for imaginative play, art and crafts, nature explorations, and family celebrations. This book embraces a whole new way of living that will engage your children’s imagination, celebrate their achievements, and help you to express love and gratitude for each other as a family.

    Through extraordinary, stylized photography and detailed close-ups of designs, the embroidery art in Stitchcraft is entirely achievable with basic stitches and easy-to-follow instructions, enchanting beginners and expert crafters alike. Stitchcraft features: - 30 intricate embroidery designs, using a combination of nine basic stitches- Insights from the author on how she created each piece - 30 basic patterns to get you started embroidering your own version of her designsFrom the anatomy of a snake to floral skulls, from palmistry hands to botanical hearts, readers will be inspired to recreate Partridge's spellbinding designs and to make them their own.