Celebrate your own nonconformist place in the world of art.Going far beyond standard notions of developing an abstract "style" or particular "look," Creating Abstract Art unleashes the numerous possibilities that abound in your creative subconscious. Familiar obstacles such as "I don't know what to paint" or "How do I know if this is good?" are easily set aside as you explore fun exercises such as connecting dots, automatic drawing, shadow hunting, working with haiku poetr...

Practical self-help for artists who want to free their creativity. Art from Intuition offers artists everywhere a unique system for freeing their own creative intuition, the sixth sense that directs an artist’s drive and work. By letting go of the self-criticism, doubt, and insecurity that discourage artmaking, artists will be able to soar to new heights of creativity. More than 60 practical exercises take the reader from the most basic intuitive art to more sophisticated techniqu...

A guide to embracing the ups and downs of the artistic process—and allowing them to carry you along your unique creative journeyWhether in painting, poetry, performance, music, dance, or life, there is an intelligence working in every situation. This force is the primary carrier of creation. If we trust it and follow its natural movement, it will astound us with its ability to find a way through problems—and even make creative use of our mistakes and failures....

Carla Sonheim is an artist and creativity workshop instructor known for her fun and innovative projects and techniques designed to help adult students recover a more spontaneous, playful approach to creating. Her innovative ideas are now collected and elaborated on in this unique volume. Carla offers a year's worth of assignments, projects, ideas, and techniques that will introduce more creativity and nonsense into your art and life. Drawing Lab for Mixed-Media Artists offers readers a fun...

Anyone who can hold a pencil can learn to draw.In this book, Bert Dodson shares his complete drawing system-fifty-five "keys" that you can use to render any subject with confidence, even if you're a beginner.These keys, along with dozens of practice exercises, will help you draw like an artist in no time.You'll learn how to:• Restore, focus, map, and intensify• Free your hand action, then learn to control it• C...

The beauty of a watercolor painting lies in its diaphanous layers, delicate strokes, and luminous washes. However, the very features that define the beauty of the medium can make it difficult to master. This complete guide to understanding the relationships between color, value, wetness, and composition unravels the mysteries of watercolor to help your practice evolve.Experienced teacher and acclaimed artist Tom Hoffmann offers a unique, inquiry-based approach that shows you how to...

Acrylic is often used as a substitute for oil paint or watercolor, but the real gold mine is in allowing the medium freedom to do what it does best. This book shows how today’s artists are doing exactly that. It’s loaded with original artwork and valuable insight from 64 artists, incredibly diverse in styles and subjects, each using acrylic in unique ways to create expressive and personal art.• 64 artists offer their individual ideas, approaches and inspirations for working with ac...

The Art of Fine Art, by artist and teacher Eo Omwake, is for anyone who wishes to increase their understanding of Fine Art Painting. It is for advanced arti sts already working and for beginners. It is also for those contemplating making art for the first time and for art appreciators who would like to understand Art at a higher level.The ideas herein distill much of what Eo has learned throughout fift y years of making art. They are what he considers crucial for making an...

The Natural Way to Draw - A Working Plan for Art Study contains a classic guide to drawing people, offering instructions and tips for drawing different poses and body types.It is split into sixty-four easy exercises covering such subjects as:With simple, step-by-step instructions and many helpful diagrams, this is a book that will be of considerable utility to anyone wishing to learn how to draw.Many vintage books such as this are increasin...

Ateliers have produced the greatest artists of all time—and now that educational model is experiencing a renaissance. These studios, a return to classical art training, are based on the nineteenth-century model of teaching artists by pairing them with a master artist over a period of years. Students begin by copying masterworks, then gradually progress to painting as their skills develop. Classical Drawing Atelier is an atelier in a book—and the master is Juliette Aristides, a cla...

Because nature is so expansive and complex, so varied in its range of light, landscape painters often have to look further and more deeply to find form and structure, value patterns, and an organized arrangement of shapes. In Landscape Painting, Mitchell Albala shares his concepts and practices for translating nature's grandeur, complexity, and color dynamics into convincing representations of space and light. Concise, practical, and inspirational, Landscape Painting focu...

Want to paint more like Manet and less like Jackson Pollock?Students of art hailed Classical Drawing Atelier, Juliette Aristides’s first book, as a dynamic return to the atelier educational model. Ateliers, popular in the nineteenth century, teach emerging artists by pairing them with a master artist over a period of years. The educational process begins as students copy masterworks, then gradually progress to painting as their skills develop. The many artists at every lev...