The Inspired Artist series invites art hobbyists and casual art enthusiasts to have fun learning basic art concepts, relaxing into the creative process to make art in a playful, contemporary style. With Draw Every Little Thing, the first book in this new series, you can learn to draw and paint your favorite everyday items. From learning to draw and paint plants, flowers, and bicycles to the neighborhood café and the contents of the kitchen cabinet, this contemporary drawing book demonstrates just how easy it is to render the world around you with little more than a pencil, paper, and paint. Following a brief introduction to the joys of simplistic drawing and painting, this aesthetically pleasing book familiarizes you with a range of drawing tools and materials, including graphite pencil, pen and ink, colored pencil, and gouache, before offering a quick overview of basic color theory. Each subsequent chapter is then devoted to a specific theme—kitchenalia, hobbies, neighborhood haunts, and much more—and packed with simple step-by-step drawing projects. This accessible book encourages you to jump around so you can draw what immediately inspires you. Interactive prompts, creative exercises, and inspiring ideas make the process fun and engaging. Easy techniques and helpful instructions show you how to develop your own personal style, as well as add color to your drawings using gouache and colored pencil. Crafty projects round out the book, allowing you to use your newfound drawing and painting skills. Filled to the brim with whimsical artwork and loads of creative ideas, Draw Every Little Thing encourages artists of all skill levels to draw any time inspiration strikes.

    It is also a book they may want to keep out of view of their professors, for it expresses in clear and simple language things that tend to be murky and abstruse in the classroom. These 101 concise lessons in design, drawing, the creative process, and presentation--from the basics of "How to Draw a Line" to the complexities of color theory--provide a much-needed primer in architectural literacy, making concrete what too often is left nebulous or open-ended in the architecture curriculum. Each lesson utilizes a two-page format, with a brief explanation and an illustration that can range from diagrammatic to whimsical. The lesson on "How to Draw a Line" is illustrated by examples of good and bad lines; a lesson on the dangers of awkward floor level changes shows the television actor Dick Van Dyke in the midst of a pratfall; a discussion of the proportional differences between traditional and modern buildings features a drawing of a building split neatly in half between the two. Written by an architect and instructor who remembers well the fog of his own student days, 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School provides valuable guideposts for navigating the design studio and other classes in the architecture curriculum. Architecture graduates--from young designers to experienced practitioners--will turn to the book as well, for inspiration and a guide back to basics when solving a complex design problem.

    The 16 project-based lessons show readers step-by-step the key techniques for working with InDesign CS6. Readers learn what they need to know to create engaging page layouts using InDesign CS6. This completely revised CS6 edition covers the new tools for adding PDF form fields, linking content, and creating alternative layouts for digital publishing. The companion CD includes all the lesson files that readers need to work along with the book. This thorough, self-paced guide to Adobe InDesign CS6 is ideal for beginning users who want to master the key features of this program. Readers who already have some experience with InDesign can improve their skills and learn InDesign's newest features. "The Classroom in a Book series is by far the best training material on the market. Everything you need to master the software is included: clear explanations of each lesson, step-by-step instructions, and the project files for the students." -Barbara Binder, Adobe Certified Instructor, Rocky Mountain Training Classroom in a Book(R), the best-selling series of hands-on software training workbooks, helps you learn the features of Adobe software quickly and easily. Classroom in a Book offers what no other book or training program does-an official training series from Adobe Systems Incorporated, developed with the support of Adobe product experts. All of Peachpit's eBooks contain the same content as the print edition. You will find a link in the last few pages of your eBook that directs you to the media files.Helpful tips:If you are able to search the book, search for "Where are the lesson files?"Go to the very last page of the book and scroll backwards.You will need a web-enabled device or computer in order to access the media files that accompany this ebook. Entering the URL supplied into a computer with web access will allow you to get to the files.Depending on your device, it is possible that your display settings will cut off part of the URL. To make sure this is not the case, try reducing your font size and turning your device to a landscape view. This should cause the full URL to appear.

    Urban sketching--the process of sketching on the go as a regular practice--is a hot trend in the drawing world. In this aspirational guide, French artist France Belleville-Van Stone offers motivation to move beyond the comfort zone, as well as instruction on turning rough sketches into finished work. By sharing her own creative process, which includes sketching by hand and digitally, Belleville-Van Stone emboldens readers to craft a method of their own and devote more time to art, even if it's just 10 minutes a day. "Sketch Your World" will inspire artists both established and aspiring to rethink their daily practice, sketch for the pure joy of it, and document their lives and the world around them.

    A fascinating mix of established master draftsmen and neophytes, working in a vast range of techniques, Illustration Now! Vol. 3 features illustrators from 30 countries, including  information about their career paths, and lists of selected exhibitions. Also included is an introduction by specialist Steven Heller on current trends in the field. This book is perfect for graphic artists, creative professionals and illustration students, as well as anyone with an appreciation for draftsmanship and visual language.

    Need some pillows for your new couch, and have a bunch of old wool sweaters? Turn those sweaters into felt! Knitting, felting, leather tooling, glass and metal work––it's all here. CRAFTIVITY is filled with 60 amazing DIY projects that make the most of what you have by taking old stuff and turning it into functional, breathtaking art.

    Taking a "both/and" approach, this book provides step-by-step guidance on drawing tools and techniques and offers practical suggestions on how to use these skills in conjunction with digital tools on real-world projects. Illustrated with nearly 300 full color drawings, the book includes a series of video demonstrations that reinforces the sketching techniques.

    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.

    A new generation of artists--as well as some who never abandoned figurative painting in the first place--is relishing the solitary, slow, subtle set of processes involved in not just painting, but painting people. They are choosing paint's unique ability to distill a lifetime of events rather than photography's glimpse of a frozen moment. Painting People, edited by the prominent London art historian and critic Charlotte Mullins, unites and contrasts the work of a key group of artists from around the world, and investigates their richly varied accomplishments in lucid text with detailed commentaries, accompanied by more than 150 reproductions. The list of contributing artists is stellar, ranging from photo-based painters like Luc Tuymans, Peter Doig and Marlene Dumas to Pop artists like Sigmar Polke and Alex Katz, photorealists like Chuck Close and Gerhard Richter, Neoexpressionists like Cecily Brown, and comics-inspired painters like Yoshitomo Nara, Inka Essenhigh and Takashi Murakami. There are erotic grotesques from John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, meditations on the muse by Elizabeth Peyton and Lucian Freud, "Repro-realistic" work from Neo Rauch and of course self-portraits by Philip Akkerman and Marcel Dzama, among others.

    It contains art work from the game, along with commentary by the developers for each piece of art and style approach.

    The three twenty-something co-owners of Stitch Lounge, an urban sewing studio in San Francisco, teach you, in plain, fun language, how to do it, whether you're hand sewing, machine sewing, or, in a few cases, simply wielding a pair of scissors.The first three chapters lay the ground work: Hand Sewing Basics, You and Your Machine, and Gearing Up, which includes Fabric 101, how to set up a sewing space, and a run-through first project on the sewing machine. Then the fun begins with Embellishing and Customizing projects, including adorning your pant legs with ribboning, turning a computer-scanned image into an iron-on that you can apply to a t-shirt or skirt, taking in a skirt, or untapering a pair of pants (the authors believe tapered pants are the devil's work). Then move onto Refashioning: The Next Life of Your Old Clothes and turn a t-shirt into a skirt, a sweater into a halter top or legwarmers, or a pair of pants into a hip belt. There are 22 projects in all, some of which only require an iron and/or pair of scissors, while others can be sewn by hand, for those readers who haven't yet made the sewing machine plunge.

    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.

    Its goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Each book features the creative process and core thinking of a photographer told in their own words and through pictures of their choosing, and is introduced by a well-known student of the featured photographer. In this book, Todd Hido explores the genres of landscape, interior and nude photography, with emphasis on creating images from a personal perspective and with a sense of intimacy. Through words and photographs, he also offers insight into his own practice and discusses a wide range of creative issues, including mining one's own memory and experience as inspiration; using light, texture and detail for greater impact; exploring the narrative potential activated when sequencing images; and creating powerful stories with emotional weight and beauty.Todd Hido (born 1968) is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist. He is well known for his photography of urban and suburban housing across the United States, and for his use of detail and luminous color. His previous books include House Hunting (2001), Outskirts (2002), Roaming (2004) and Between the Two (2007). He is a recipient of a Eureka Fellowship and a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Visual Arts Award, and is represented by Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco. He is an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts.Gregory Halpern received a BA in history and literature from Harvard University and an MFA from California College of the Arts. His third book of photographs, entitled A, is a photographic ramble through the streets of the American Rust Belt. His other books include Omaha Sketchbook and Harvard Works Because We Do. He currently teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology and is the coeditor of The Photographer's Playbook (Aperture 2013).

    Guaranteed to bringa little magic into even the most sensible life.

    Inspirational. Entertaining. One thousand blank journals are currently circulating throughout the world, beckoning contributors who find the journals by chance on trains, in cafés, and anonymously left on doorsteps. Artist Someguy shares more than 250 of the best entries: a collage of African countries repositioned into a new continent; the musings of a teen trapped in a drug- ravaged community; a student's humorous personal ad for his ideal girlfriend ("C-cup required!"). A faux leather cover and two beautifully embroidered pages bring the look and feel of the original journals to life. The perfect gift for journalists, aspiring artists, designers, and anyone who can't wait for one of the journals to magically appear in their lives.