The author instructs in coil, slab, mold, and pinch techniques to produce pots, bowls, vases, tiles, and other decorative pieces. She also advises on acquiring basic tools, mixing and preparing clay, and using coloring agents. Newcomers to pottery crafting will especially appreciate her tips for making projects easier to accomplish, such as use of a hairdryer at regular intervals for drying out too-wet clay, and easy methods for keeping clay soft and pliable. Step-by-step color photos with detailed captions guide handcrafters through each project from start to finish. Many photos are of the cutaway type to show correct hand positions for controlling the clay, both inside and outside the form. Here's the book that takes the mystery out of handbuilding in clay, demonstrating each step in the pottery-making process. More than 400 color photos.

    This guide combines the simplest kind of scenery sketching with the most complex renderings to give every artist, beginner or professional, essential scenery drawing techniques.More than 900 diagrams, pictorial explanations, and pictures

    By controlling pencil pressure and stroke, understanding light and having knowledge of blending techniques, an artist can enhance their work and offer the “wow” factor needed to produce realistic artworks. Drawing Dimension - A Shading Guide for Teachers and Students offers a series of shading tutorials that are easy to understand and simple to follow. It goes beyond the standard "step by step" instruction to offer readers an in-depth look at a variety of shading techniques and their applications. Inside this book is a series of lessons designed to teach you how to add dimension to your own drawings, how to analyze real life objects and shade, create highlights, blend tones, and produce realistic drawings with ease. We will explore hatching, cross hatching, and stippling techniques and learn how to use contrast to set a mood and create a focal point. At last - we’ll put all of these skills to the test and work together to produce a beautiful piece of art. Drawing Dimension - A Shading Guide for Teachers and Students includes many resources to help you along the way through examples, tips on what you should aim for, and pitfalls to avoid. Each lesson is tailored to help you refine your shading techniques so you can add more depth and realism to your work. The book is perfectly suitable for beginners and moderates of all ages, students and teachers, professionals and novices; anyone can learn how to shade like a pro!

    Fresh coats of paint and newly pasted posters appear overnight in cities across the world. New artists, new ideas, and new tactics displace faded images in a perpetual process of renewal and metamorphosis. From Los Angeles to Barcelona, Stockholm to Tokyo, Melbourne to Milan, wall spaces are a breeding ground for graphic and typographic forms as artists unleash their daily creations.Current graffiti art is reflective of the world around it. Using new materials and techniques, its innovators are creating a language of forms and images infused with contemporary graphic design and illustration. Fluent in branding and graphic imagery, they have been replacing tags with more personal logos and shifting from typographic to iconographic forms of communication.Street Logos is a worldwide celebration of these new developments in twenty-first-century graffiti, an essential sourcebook for all art and design professionals, and a delight to everyone excited by the vitality of the street.

    King of the whittlers.' Sunday Telegraph Barn The Spoon, as he’s affectionately known is a rare master craftsman in the art of spoon carving. In this book he generously shares his extraordinary skill, gentle philosophy and his life’s work – designing and carving beautiful spoons that are both a joy to use and hold.The simple, ordinary spoon is part of our everyday lives, intimately entwined with the acts of eating and socialising, from stirring our first cup of coffee to scraping the last bit of pudding from the bowl. And who doesn't like to spoon in bed? Barn’s spoons will take you on a journey into the new wood culture, from understanding the relationship between wood, the raw material and its majestic origins in our trees and woodland, to the workshop and the axe block, and into your own kitchen. Barn will show you how to use the axe and knife, from how they should feel in your hand to honing the perfect edge when carving your own spoons. Featuring sixteen unique designs in the four main categories of spoon – eating, serving, cooking and measuring spoons, Barn takes you through the nuances of their making, how each design is informed by its function at the table or in the kitchen, and the key skills you will learn – such as creating octagonal handles, manipulating grain patterns and mastering bent branches. Beautiful photography will inspire and act as a blue-print to help perfect your technique.

    While it embodies the entire system of his teaching, with much technical advice and critical comment for the student, it also contains inspiration for those to whom the happiness to be found through all the arts is important.No other American painter attracted such a large, intensely personal group of followers as Henri, whose death in 1929 brought to an end a life that has been completely devoted to art. He was an inspired artist and teacher who believed that everyone is vitally concerned in the happiness and wisdom to be found through the arts. Many of his paintings have been acquired by museums and private collectors. Among them are the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Wichita Art Museum, and Yale University Art Gallery.

    Successful colored pencil artists and teachers, Janie Gildow and Barbara Benedetti Newton answer the most commonly asked questions about colored pencil techniques.Over twenty easy-to-follow, step-by-step demonstrations show you how to:- Select the right tools, as well as set up your workspace to optimize efficiency and comfort - Effectively express yourself through color and value to create light, shadow and mood - Use and master basic essential colored pencil techniques - Create the look of realistic metal, including brass, copper and silver - Create glass that sparkles, mirrors that reflect and water that distorts - Create realistic texture, from slippery satin, fuzzy peaches and velvety roses to coarse linen and the bumpy surface of corn - Fix common mistakes and problems with easy-to-use solutions Whether you already enjoy working with colored pencils or are looking to try this exciting medium for the first time, this book will provide you with all the information you need to create your own colored pencil compositions.

    Written by Misty Mawn, these pages will inspire anyone who wishes to open up more to the process of making art.  The book begins with art exercises in drawing and painting that include portraiture, contour drawing, backgrounds, layering, and working with a still life, followed by collage and image transfer techniques. The second section offers exercises and projects in stamp carving, paper pottery, sculpture, origami, paper doll making, and surface design. These tactile explorations offer an enjoyment of the process as well as wonderful handmade projects. The last section shares a variety of approaches to visual journaling. There are instructions for binding your own journal, prompts and ideas for working on your pages, and a variety of exercises using photography and poetry as ways to inspire and inform your journal keeping.  You'll also find a set of gift book plates and a beautiful paper doll designed by the author and printed on perforated cardstock in the back of the book.Tap into your inner creativity and explore new artistic processes with Unfurling!

     In The Essence of Watercolour Hazel shows how wonderfully versatile and beguiling the medium of watercolour is and how to get the most out of it. Hazel stresses how important it is to understand the characteristics of the medium in order to exploit it to the full.  She encourages the reader to explore the properties of watercolour and to be unafraid of strength of colour and brushstroke.Hazel shows through demonstration and projects that tone is king in watercolour and illustrates how to paint light with the use of shade. Armed with this understanding she demonstrates that watercolour is not such an unforgiving medium after all: accidents and mistakes can be disguised, overridden and corrected.The Essence of Watercolour is a culmination of many years of Hazel's teaching and demonstrating, in which she offers inspirational insights into the secrets of watercolour painting and encourages artists to take their art to the next level.

    In this comprehensive guide, Phil Metzger demystifies perspective, presenting it simply as a matter of mimicking the way we see--like the way a distant mountain appears blue, or a road seems to narrow in the distance.The Art of Perspective offers simple but powerful techniques for achieving a convincing illusion of depth and distance, whether it's a few inches in a still life or miles in a landscape.- Start simple, with atmospheric perspective and intuitive techniques, and gradually progress to linear perspective and more complex challenges such as stairways, curves and reflections. - Use the engaging, step-by-step demonstrations and exercises to try out each essential concept for yourself, making lessons clearer and more memorable. - Learn theories that apply to all mediums, with specific advice for achieving effects using acrylic, oil, watercolor and pencil. - Get the inside scoop on professional tricks and shortcuts that make perspective easier than ever! Forget everything you think you know (or don't know) about perspective. This book builds an easy-to-follow, ground-up understanding of how to turn a flat painting or drawing surface into a living, breathing, dimensional scene that lures viewers in. No matter how you look at it, it's the ultimate guide to perspective for artists of every medium and skill level.

    Written with clarity and passion by a leader in the field, it covers all the popular techniques, the fundamentals of setting up a studio, and 14 fabulous projects. The various styles range from traditional cloisonné, champlevé, and plique-à-jour to experimental techniques such as firing enamel onto mesh forms. Even more creative possibilities await in the firing: use copper oxide to create cool color variations or try raku firing for unique effects. All the well-photographed projects, from a vibrantly toned flower ring to an elegant set of buttons with a delicate leaf pattern, encourage novices to use their skills and imagination.

    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.

    Everyone has heard the mantra 'Knitting is the new yoga' but not everyone is lucky enough to have someone to show them the ropes and get them started on their very first row. Unless they have a friend or relative to teach them how to start, often would-be knitters turn to the so-called 'beginners patterns' but these can be confusing, difficult to follow, and more often than not written in 'knit' rather than English. This book will be a tried and tested guide for people at the very beginning of their knitting lives, looking for guidance and patterns for projects that they can use to make that first all-important step to 'Beyond the Scarf'.Contents include: Knitting Basics: Getting Started; Knitter's First Project: The Scarf; Workshops: Decreasing; Creating a Rib; Changing Colour; Increasing; Finishing; Knitting a Flower; Cable: Making a Cable; Making a Cable Bag; Eyelets and so on...

    Ordinary art. Ordinary art means something like: all art not made by Mozart. After all, art is rarely made by Mozart-like people; essentially-statistically speaking-there aren't any people like that. Geniuses get made once-a-century or so, yet good art gets made all the time, so to equate the making of art with the workings of genius removes this intimately human activity to a strangely unreachable and unknowable place. For all practical purposes making art can be examined in great detail without ever getting entangled in the very remote problems of genius."--from the Introduction

    Even if you don't consider yourself a doodler, the exercises and techniques in this book will give you a fun way to tap into your personal style.The invitation starts with a pencil as you work through doodle assignments. Eventually, you will learn how to size up and combine these doodles into larger compositions. Then, you will begin mixing it up with watercolor paints and, finally, with acrylic paints.In If You Can Doodle, You Can Paint we will:Dig for treasure/doodleObserve, arrange, and studyMake folded books for doodle-ready surfacesCopy your images with hand/eye coordinationScan and enlarge your doodlesAdd color combinations with colored pencil and acrylic paintCreate compositional grid paintings, andCreate a large complete painting!So what are you waiting for? Grab some pens and paints and get creative!