Beautifully produced and co-published with La Lux de Jesus, this is an objet d'art in itself, revealing the complexity of Elizabeth McGrath's sweetly twisted creatures, giving a glimpse of what the Island of Misfit Toys might have become had it been saved by Satan rather than Santa.

    When used effectively, line and mark-making convey texture, tone, form, movement, and mood. With Drawn to Stitch by your side, learn creative uses of line in embroidery and textile art.Artist and teacher Gwen Hedley shares a series of exercises designed to explore line’s potential as well as develop your creativity. Drawn to Stitch also covers line and mark-making tools, materials, and processes, including printing and mixed-media techniques. Gwen explores stitch, explaining how to interpret different line qualities from crisp and sharp to soft and diffused and from raised and overlaid to recessed and inlaid.Full of inspiring ideas, Drawn to Stitch is illustrated with stunning examples of stitched-textile work from leading artists.

    To create profound, honest, and truly revealing portraits of these luminaries, Zuckerman has captured their voices, their physical presence, and the written word. The resulting book and film - included here on a DVD - provide an extraordinary legacy for the generations that follow, and a timeless portrait of the common experiences that unite us all.

    Composition is the harmonious arranging of the component parts of a work of art into a unified whole. Henry Poore examines the works of old masters and moderns in this book and uses these examples to explain the principles of compositions in art.All the paintings that the author analyzes are illustrated in the text — 166 illustrations, including 9 in full color. Thirty-two diagrams by the author accompany his textural discussion of such topics as the importance of balance, entrance and exit, circular observation, angular composition, composition with one or more units, and light and shade. Balance is the most important of these topics, and it is considered in the greatest detail — balance of the steelyard, vertical and horizontal balance, and so on. A complete index enables the reader to locate his own specific areas of interest.To see how a painting by Cézanne, Goya, or Hopper, for example, follows definite principles of composition allows the practicing artist or art student to learn composition from the finest instructors — the artists themselves. This book is also very useful to the art devotee, who will find his appreciation of the subject greatly enhanced.

    (It's not as scary as it sounds…not with Mark and Mary as your guide!) At the heart of this book, a series of fun, hands-on exercises help you practice and perfect your strokes—24 mini-demos lead up to 9 full step-by-step demos. Each exercise builds on the previous one as you develop your skills, build your confidence, and enjoy yourself along the way. The lessons you learn by drawing simple subjects such as coffee mugs, clouds and trees will help you take on progressively more challenging matter like animals, still lifes, landscapes and portraits…the kinds of subjects and scenes you've always dreamt of drawing. This book is just the ticket for budding artists of any age. It's never too early and never too late to discover the pure joy of drawing!

    Or they can lead to different destinations: places turned upside down or inside out, territories riddled with marks understood only by their maker, realms connected more to the interior mind than to the exterior world. These are the places of artists' maps, that happy combination of information and illusion that flourishes in basement studios and downtown galleries alike. It is little surprise that, in an era of globalized politics, culture, and ecology, contemporary artists are drawn to maps to express their visions. Using paint, salt, souvenir tea towels, or their own bodies, map artists explore a world free of geographical constraints.Katharine Harmon knows this territory. As the author of our best-selling book You Are Here, she has inspired legions of new devotees of imaginative maps. In The Map as Art, Harmon collects 360 colorful, map-related artistic visions by well-known artistssuch as Ed Ruscha, Julian Schnabel, Olafur Eliasson, Maira Kalman, William Kentridge, and Vik Munizand many more less-familiar artists for whom maps are the inspiration for creating art. Essays by Gayle Clemans bring an in-depth look into the artists' maps of Joyce Kozloff, Landon Mackenzie, Ingrid Calame, Guillermo Kuitca, and Maya Lin. Together, the beautiful reproductions and telling commentary make this an essential volume for anyone open to exploring new paths.

    Each chapter, devoted to a color, begins with a short, inspiring essay that explores the qualities, meaning, and symbolism of that color, written in the same warm and lovely voice that guided the reader through "Visions of Earth." Color chapters include photographs that are predominantly blue, orange, green, yellow, purple and red. Smaller sections present images in silver, brown, black, gold, white, and "unseen color"--not seen with the naked eye, such as laser, the universe, and microscopic images. Throughout, interesting quotes and surprising short insights in the captions give the reader an entirely new look at the color in the world around us. Chock full of beautiful, amazing, fun images, this eye-pleasing volume is sure to appeal to a wide variety of people, most especially to women.

    From facial expressions to creative coloring, this book contains all the know-how you need to create anthropomorphic cat, dog, horse, rodent and bird characters.Step by step, you'll learn how to:- Draw species-appropriate tails, eyes, wings and other fun details - Give your characters clothes, poses and personalities - Create the perfect backgrounds for your furry antics--with two start-to-finish demonstrations showing howPacked with tons of inspiration--from teeny-bopper bunnies and yorky glamour queens to Ninja squirrels and lion kings--Draw Furries will help you create a world of crazy, cool characters just waiting to burst out of your imagination.

    Yet in 1979, the Amon Carter Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, daringly commissioned him to do just that.The resulting 1985 exhibition and book, In the American West, was a milestone in American photography and Avedon's most important body of work. His unflinching portraits of oilfield and slaughterhouse workers, miners, waitresses, drifters, mental patients, teenagers, and others captured the unknown and often-ignored people who work at hard, uncelebrated jobs. Making no apologies for shattering stereotypes of the West and Westerners, Avedon said, "I'm looking for a new definition of a photographic portrait. I'm looking for people who are surprising—heartbreaking—or beautiful in a terrifying way. Beauty that might scare you to death until you acknowledge it as part of yourself."Photographer Laura Wilson worked with Avedon during the six years he was making In the American West. In Avedon at Work, she presents a unique photographic record of his creation of this masterwork—the first time a major photographer has been documented in great depth over an extended period of time. She combines images she made during the photographic sessions with entries from her journal to show Avedon's working methods, his choice of subjects, his creative process, and even his experiments and failures. Also included are a number of Avedon's finished portraits, as well as his own comments and letters from some of the subjects.Avedon at Work adds a new dimension to our understanding of one of the twentieth century's most significant series of portraits. For everyone interested in the creative process it confirms that, in Laura Wilson's words, "much as all these photographs may appear to be moments that just occurred, they are finally, in varying degrees, works of the imagination."

    Rebecca Litchfield is one who couldn t resist the haunting allure of the ruins of the Soviet Union. Time and again she risked radiation exposure, experienced arrest and interrogation, and was accused of espionage while collecting the stunning photography in Soviet Ghosts. Join her on an adventure through the ruins of soviet bloc, never before seen by western eyes. The emotional affect of this poetic collection will keep you coming back for more, while a series of expert articles offer in-depth analysis of the historical context. Contemplate the uncanny and disturbing emotional power of the imagery. Discover the story of the rise and fall of the USSR, the empire whose ghost continues to haunt Europe even today... Features A breathtaking collection of images from Pripyat, Chernobyl Stunning imagery of a vast, ruined Bulgarian communist monument. A road trip through the ruined abandonment in East Germany, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Croatia and Russia featuring decaying hospitals, military barracks, prisons, spy stations and sports halls and more. Photographer Rebecca Litchfield captures many abandoned locations, which were either part of the Soviet Union or occupied satellite states during this period of history, including forgotten towns, factories, prisons, schools, monuments, hospitals, theatres, military complexes, asylums & death camps across the former communist states. These photographs deliver a compelling narrative of both moral bankruptcy and flawed ideology. Featuring stunning imagery throughout, this compelling road-trip through the old USSR, breathes new life into these forgotten places, finding both beauty and meaning in their post-apocalyptic decay. Extended essays by Tristi Brownett, Neill Cockwill and Professor Owen Evans, offer considerable contextual depth to the locations imbuing them with a wealth of connection and wonder. By virtue of its holistic approach, the book also explores how and why these once thriving communities became abandoned, whether by natural disaster, man-made catastrophe or simply through the march of time."

    Considered shocking and provocative back in the 60s, by the climax of his career he enjoyed the reputation of a photographer who was able to imagine and visualize his subjects as women who take the lead rather than follow it; women who enjoy the resplendence and vitality of their bodies; women who are both responsible and willing. This book presents a whole spectrum of Newton's work and celebrates the long career of this outstanding and prolific photographer.

    This book can help you bring all of these together in one beautiful creation.Here you'll see magnificent collages by leading artists who show you--in step-by-step demonstrations--how to begin, how to design, how to apply collage techniques in exciting ways.Plus you'll get your chance to use those techniques with nearly fifty projects that challenge you to do your most creative work.

    Slight of build, shy by nature, prone to fits of depression, the 28-year-old Beijing photographer was nonetheless at the forefront of Chinese artists' battle for creative freedom. Like his champion Ai Weiwei, Ren was controversial in his homeland and wildly popular in the rest of the world. He said, -I don't really view my work as taboo, because I don't think so much in cultural context, or political context. I don't intentionally push boundaries, I just do what I do.- Why? Because his models, friends, and increasingly, fans, are naked, often outdoors, high in the trees or on the terrifyingly vertiginous rooftops of Beijing, stacked like building blocks, heads wrapped in octopi, body cavities sprouting phone cords and flowers, whatever enters his mind at the moment. He denies his intentions are sexual, and there is a clean detachment about even his most extreme images: the urine, the insertions, the many, many erections. In a 2013 interview VICE magazine asked, -there are a lot of dicks ... do you just like dicks?- Ren responded, -It's not just dicks I'm interested in, I like to portray every organ in a fresh, vivid and emotional way.- True though that may be, the penises Ren photographed are not just fresh and vivid, but unusually large, making one wonder just where he met his friends. In the same piece, Hang also stated, -Gender isn't important when I'm taking pictures, it only matters to me when I'm having sex, - making him a pioneer of gender inclusiveness. Young fans still eagerly flock to his website, Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr accounts. His photographs, all produced on film, have been the subject of over 20 solo and 70 group shows in his brief six-year career, in cities as disparate as Tokyo, Athens, Paris, New York, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Vienna, and yes, even Beijing. He self-published 16 monographs, in tiny print runs, that now sell for up to $600. TASCHEN's Ren Hang is his only international collection, covering his entire career, with well-loved favorites and many never-before-seen photos of men, women, Beijing, and those many, many erections. We take solace remembering Ren's joy when he first held the book, shared by his long-time partner Jiaqi, featured on the cover.Text in English, French, and German

    From the chaos of the Civil War to the simple beauty of the islands; from legendary revolutionaries to modest fisherfolk, every image has been exquisitely transformed and every page bursting with life. Using a combination of cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology and his own historical research, John Breslin has meticulously colourised these pictures with breath-taking attention to detail and authenticity. With over 250 photographs from all four provinces, and accompanied by fascinating captions by historian Sarah-Anne Buckley, Old Ireland in Colour breathes new life into the scenes we thought we knew, and brings our ancestors back to life before our eyes.

    Archaeologist and medieval historian Alexander Langlands reaches as far back as the Neolithic period to recover our lost sense of craft, combining deep history with detailed scientific analyses and his own experiences making traditional crafts. Craft brims with vivid storytelling, rich descriptions of natural landscape, and delightful surprises that will convince us to introduce more craft into our lives.