In The Elements of Landscape Oil Painting, established Watson-Guptill author and noted instructor/painter Suzanne Brooker presents the fundamentals necessary for mastering landscape oil painting, breaking landscapes down into component parts: sky, terrain, trees, and water. Each featured element builds off the previous, with additional lessons on the latest brushes, paints, and other tools used by artists. Key methods like observation, rendering, and color mixing are supported by demonstration paintings and samples from a variety of the best landscape oil painters of all time. With The Elements of Landscape Oil Painting, oil painters looking to break into landscape painting or enhance their work will find all the necessary ingredients for success.

    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.

    It's an ancient art, dating as far back as Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, and today is enjoying a revival. Here is the first comprehensive guide available on mastering this beautiful yet demanding medium. In The Art of Encaustic Painting, readers will learn surefire ways to achieve vibrant color and create surfaces that look as light as a wash or as densely textured as impasto. They will see how to produce effects from abstract to figurative to minimal. Finally, they will discover dozens of clear, step-by-step directions detailing how to use these various encaustic techniques in their own art. This remarkable reference also includes 200 attractive full-color photographs of the author's own work, as well as stunning examples by such premier encaustic artists as Jasper Johns, Arthur Dove, and Nancy Graves.

    This is such a book. For more than two years, Linda Cateura has pursued teacher / artist David A. Leffel, notebook in hand, as he critiqued the work of students. Linda Cateura's succinct notes capture his insights, philosophy, painting hints, and general comments.Leffel's classic, painterly, twentieth-century old master style, much in the manner of Rembrandt or Chardin, affords ample illustration of the ideas expressed - through his many paintings, details, demonstrations, and diagrams, almost all in color.No matter what your level of ability, there is something here to apply to your own work, ideas that will cause you to rething your own ways of painting, hints to save you effort, or solutions to persistent painting problems.

    This book contains techniques for creating the tiles such as painting and glazing, stamping, and, embedding items like beads and buttons.

    The author demonstrates the techniques involved in using more than thirty different materials ranging from papier-mache to breakaway glass.While the use of some materials-plaster and polyester resins, for example-is covered to some extent in other publications, information on the selection and use of rubber materials (latex, neoprene, silicone, and the urethanes) and the procedure for making breakaway windows and bottles is available only in The Prop Builder's Molding & Casting Handbook.Written in an easy, conversational style, the book will be useful to anyone involved with theater properties, puppetry, and costuming (as professionals or amateurs). It will also serve admirably the needs of students taking classes in those subjects.Completing the book is a special section on designing and building a vacuum forming machine suitable for use in constructing theater props. More than 450 photographs illustrate the step-by-step procedures explained throughout the entire text.

    In composition, it recognizes the separate but equally important identity of both a shape and its background.Since their introduction in the West, the intriguing exercises associated with Notan have produced striking results in every branch of Western art and design. This book, by two American artists and teachers who made an intensive study of Notan, was the first basic book on the subject in the West, and it remains one of the definitive texts. Through a series of simple exercises, it places the extraordinary creative resources of Notan easily within the grasp of Western artists and designers.Clearly and concisely, the authors demonstrate Notan's practical applications in six problems of progressive difficulty — creative exercises that will fascinate artists and designers of every calling and level of expertise. Along with these exercises, the book includes many illustrations of the principle of Notan, among them images as diverse as a sculpture by David Smith, a Samoan tapa cloth, a Museum of Modern Art shopping bag, New England gravestone rubbings, Japanese wrapping paper, a painting by Robert Motherwell, a psychedelic poster, and a carved and dyed Nigerian calabash. Painters, sculptors, potters, jewelry, and textile designers, architects, and interior designers all will discover — or rediscover — in these pages an ancient principle of composition that can help them meet creative challenges with fresh new perspective.

    It's an insightful artistic philosophy that boils down the many technical principles of composition into a single master rule that's easy to remember and apply: Never make any two intervals the same.You can make every painting more interesting, dynamic and technically sound by varying intervals of distance, length and space, as well as intervals of value and color. The rule also applies to balance, shape and the location of your painting's focal point.Greg Albert illustrates these lessons with eye-opening examples from both beginning and professional artists, including Frank Webb, Tony Couch, Kevin Macpherson, Charles Reid, Tony Van Hasselt and more.You'll discover that the ONE RULE is the only rule of composition you need to immediately improve your work - the moment your brush touches the canvas.

    It is a personal, private place where you have unlimited freedom to express yourself, experiment, discover, dream and document your world. The possibilities are endless.In How to Keep a Sketchbook Journal, Claudia Nice shows you samples from her own journals and provides you with advice and encouragement for keeping your own. She reviews types of journals, from theme and garden journals to travel journals and fantasy sketchbooks, as well as the basic techniques for using pencils, pens, brushes, inks and watercolors to capture your thoughts and impressions.Exactly what goes in your journal is up to you. Sketch quickly to capture a thought or image before it vanishes. Draw or paint with care, to render an idea or vision as realistically as possible. Write about what you see. The choice is yours--and the memories you'll preserve will last a lifetime.

    It can be a wonderful art form and a means of self-expression. Collage Journeys presents a series of innovative workshop assignments, each designed to relate the technique and format of a collage to its subject. Gathering materials, generating ideas, painting with paper, working in layers, using text, keeping a visual journal—project by project, new collage skills are explored. Stunning finished pieces offer additional ideas and inspiration. For anyone who has ever wanted to take collage to the next level‐adding meaning, subtext, and style—Collage Journeys offers the journey of a lifetime.

    It features six step-by-step demonstrations by well-known artists, so readers can learn firsthand from the pros.

    But every volume of The DK Art School gives the reader the precise information needed to create a delightful work of art.

    You choose whether to let the sun blaze or the rain pour, to move a maple tree here or make the trail wind over there, to subdue a hillside with quiet greens or make a forest glow with dazzling golds and reds. It's not only a matter of what to paint, but how to go about painting it.This book examines, one at a time, the three major elements of landscape painting: water, sky and land. You will be encouraged to try numerous ways of painting each one. Then you can choose the methods that best express how the outdoors speaks to you.Let this reliable collection of tips, techniques, ideas and lessons be your companion on a sure path to creative fulfillment and better watercolor landscapes.

    Pencil Drawing Techniques brings together six of today's best artists, all of whom are incredibly fine instructors as well.The artists show you how to develop your skill and ability in handling pencil technique. Ferdinand Petrie shows you how to handle pencils and produce a controlled variety of lines, values, and textures. Then he shows you exactly how to use these techniques to draw landscapes in a range of styles and compositions.Rudy De Reyna explains pencil basics, and explores perspective, size relationships, form, and structure. Douglas grave teaches you how to begin drawing portraits by building a drawing step-by-step. Norman Dams and Joe Singer demonstrate how you can use the pencil to produce spectacular drawings of animals. John Blockley and Richard Bolton show you how pencil drawings can capture the essence of a subject and help you work out a plan for painting it. Finally, Bet Borgeson teaches you all the secrets of colored pencil work and demonstrates a whole new dimension. The book is divided into seven sections: how to handle a pencil, fundamentals of drawing, drawing landscapes, drawing portraits, drawing animals, drawing for watercolors, and handling color pencils. The copious illustrations show in detail how the artists use their techniques. For the artist who uses the pencil, Pencil Drawing Techniques is an an excellent instructional book of ideas for using the pencil creatively.

    Colorists will enjoy hours of creative pleasure with this all-original gallery of paisley designs — 30 full-page illustrations swirling with gorgeous organic themes.