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

    Yet only the finished article is presented. Rarely do we gain insight into how visual solutions have been reached or the exploration, experimentation, and ideas behind them. In this ambitious publication, some one hundred of the world’s leading graphic designers and illustrators open up their private sketchbooks to offer a privileged glimpse into their creative processes. The result is a visual tour de force.Among the many artists featured are Milton Glaser, an icon of American graphic design and creator of the seminal I Love New York logo, who was the first designer to receive the National Medal of Arts, in 2009. Michael Bierut, a partner of Pentagram Design, is known as an advocate of the power and influence of design and co-founded the online journal Design Observer; he has clients ranging from the Walt Disney Company to Princeton and Yale to the New York Jets. Ed Fella, a prolific photographer as well as an iconoclastic typographer and designer, is known for fusing high- and low-culture sources and began mixing, changing, and matching fonts long before it was possible—and popular—with desktop publishing. Bruce Mau is the designer of the seminal S,M,L,XL and now has a client list including MTV, Coca Cola, and Frank Gehry.Samples range from small, discrete typographical explorations to full-fledged illustrations, from a few scrappy scribbles and eccentric handwriting to photographic collages and other offbeat forms of visual inspiration. Concise and informative texts by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico—leading authorities on graphic design—provide invaluable commentary on the artists’ creative development, design philosophies, sketchbooking techniques, and visual influences. The combined effect of such high-level creativity is a treasure trove of design inspiration in a lively, engaging presentation that is a design object in itself.

    With specific how-to techniques and creative prompts on using an artist's sketchbook in a new way, these pages provide a gentle push to help you discover and integrate your creative passions through sketchbooks, workspaces, and mixed media. Through beautiful full-color imagery, you’ll learn in each chapter how your collections, scraps, ideas, and doodles can lead directly to, and fuel ideas for, creating individual works of art.Using her own materials and methods as a source of motivation, Sarah Ahearn Bellemare provides an inside look at her personal creative processes, sharing her use of her favorite resources alongside tips and tricks for making art – all the while encouraging you to explore, play, and make mistakes as part of the journey. At the end of each chapter, Sarah takes you to visit the studios and sketchbooks of some of her fellow artists – including Shanna Murray, Christine Chitnis, Stephanie Levy, and others – for behind-the-scenes glances into their creative work.Become inspired to build upon your own artistic style and discover the beauty in everyday life with Painted Pages!

    100 color illustrations.

    Comments and anecdotes by the artist and the editors, along with testimonials from graphic-art luminaries Dave Stevens, Bruce Timm, and Bernie Wrightson, flesh out this portrait of the artist.

    His influential work spans many practices over a 23-year period, from music packaging to installation work to printmaking. Here, he reveals his personal notebooks, photographs, sketches, and abandoned routes to iconic Radiohead artworks. Arranged chronologically, each chapter is dedicated to a major work—whether an album cover, promotional piece, or a personal project—and is presented as a step-by-step working case study. Featuring commentary by Thom Yorke and never-before-seen archival material, this is the first deep dive into Donwood’s creative practice and the artistic freedom afforded to him by working for a major music act. It is a must-have for fans of the band and anyone interested in graphic design and popular culture.

    For those artists (and their long-suffering friends), here is the best book ever. Facial Expressions includes more than 2,500 photographs of 50 faces—men and women of a variety of ages, shapes, sizes, and ethnicities—each demonstrating a wide range of emotions and shown from multiple angles. Who can use this book? Oh, only every artist on the planet, including art students, illustrators, fine artists, animators, storyboarders, and comic book artists. But wait, there’s more! Additional photos focus on people wearing hats and couples kissing, while illustrations show skull anatomy and facial musculature. Still not enough? How about a one-of-a-kind series of photos of lips pronouncing the phonemes used in human speech? Animators will swoon—and artists will show a range of facial expressions from happy to happiest to ecstatic.

    She'll make your first steps fun and successful!In her trademark style--friendly and encouraging--Claudia will show you how to do a sketch of a subject that actually ends up looking like the subject. And she shares her secrets for turning simple lines and dots into all kinds of lifelike textures, including leaves, glass, hair, fruit, water, clouds, wood grain, grass, fur and feathers.Easy (and fun!) exercises get you started. Step-by-step projects teach techniques as you draw trees, flowers, barns, animals and other subjects--even people! And demonstrations show you how to put all that you've learned together to create a finished picture.So go ahead--grab that pen and have fun! Just follow along with Claudia to get the hang of it, and before you know it you'll be making your own, original pen-and-ink drawings!

    Aspiring artists received step-by-step instructions for drawing people and animals using a minimum of line and circle combinations.

    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.

    It is organized as a series of exercises, all of which will provide you with essential practice for your brain, eye, and hand. The result is a powerful drawing course that does not feel like a course.

    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!

    A Dutch artist offers his concept of seeing and drawing as a discipline by which the world may be rediscovered, a way of experiencing Zen.

    Tete a Tete is a remarkable arrangement of his most memorable portraits, including Pablo Picasso, Truman Capote, Marilyn Monroe, Lucien Freud, William Faulkner, Robert Kennedy, Che Guevara, Martin Luther King Jr., Coco Chanel, and the Dalai Lama. Beyond these famous names there are also anonymous portraits, chosen for their striking and unusual features, and a selection of pencil drawings, including a self-portrait. Cartier-Bresson supervised the design of the book and the juxtaposition of all the photographs. The result is a distinguished collection of his work, diverse in its range of extraordinary and ordinary personalities from the 1930s to the 1990s. Tete a Tete reveals Cartier-Bresson as a photographer who is as skillful in recording the subtleties of the individual portrait as he is renowned for his masterful ability to capture the decisive moment.

    One of these principles is what Harold Speed calls "dither," the freedom that allows realism and the artistic vision to play against each other. Very important to any artist or work of art, this quality separates the scientifically accurate from the artistically accurate. Speed's approach to this problem is now considered a classic, one of the few books from the early years of this century that has continued to be read and recommended by those in the graphic arts.In this work, Harold Speed approaches this dynamic aspect of drawing and painting from many different points of view. He plays the historical against the scientific, theory against precise artistic definition. He begins with a study of line drawing and mass drawing, the two basic approaches the artist needs to learn. Further sections carry the artistic vision through unity and variety of line and mass, balance, proportion, portrait drawing, the visual memory, materials, and procedures. Throughout, Speed combines historical backgrounds, dynamic aspects which each technique brings to a work of art, and specific exercises through which the young draughtsman may begin his training. Although not a technique book in the strict sense of the terms, The Practice and Science of Drawing brings to the beginner a clear statement of the principles that he will have to develop and their importance in creating a work of art. Ninety-three plates and diagrams, masterfully selected, reinforce Speed's always clear presentation.Harold Speed, master of the art of drawing and brilliant teacher, has long been cited for this important work. For the beginner, Speed will develop a sense for the many different aspects which go into an artistic education. For the person who enjoys looking at drawings and paintings, Speed will aid developing the ability to see a work of art as the artist meant it to be seen.