This book enables any amateur artist to explore confidently the most popular painting medium the world has ever known: watercolour. Richly illustrated in colour throughout with well-known works of art, photographs of materials and step-by-step examples, the author shows how to achieve various effects and provides an insight into the art of watercolour. By reconstructing in practice the methods of great watercolourists, Stephenson reveals new ideas on how artists as diverse as Dürer, Cézanne, Turner and Sargent actually worked. Using examples of the most popular subjects landscapes, portraits, still-life paintings and figures Stephenson employs a series of demonstrations to show how to re-create the methods of the watercolour masters. From the initial sketch to the final painting, he guides us expertly through every brushstroke. This highly practical book will appeal both to beginners and to more experienced artists alike.

Fashion guru Catherine Schwaab packs the history of style, fashion, and its key designers into a practical and engaging guide. In Talk About Fashion, Catherine Schwaab uses her lengthy experience as a fashion journalist to break the subject down into lively and concise sections. This book offers a chronology of the major trends of the twentieth century, introduces thirty designers and their signature pieces that define fashion today, explores our high-low culture of drawing inspiration from haute couture and translating it into pieces at affordable prices, and outlines the timeless ten commandments of fashion. She identifies the brands with staying power and the role fashion plays in Hollywood. In conquering the common myth that I dont have anything to wear, Schwaab shows how to reinvent and recycle the best of fashion every day. Both mens and womens fashion are featured throughout. An appendix of practical information completes this guide, with a glossary, a visual dictionary of different tailoring cuts, and the basic essentials for every closet.

Fashions in graphic design change with bewildering rapidity, but any graphic designer with a sound grasp of the fundamental skills will be able to cope with new trends while producing work of lasting worth. Graphic Design Pocket Essentials covers graphic design on every scale, from signage schemes as big as a building to web buttons just a few pixels across. The book gives solid, in-depth advice on how to ascertain what your client really needs, before amazing them with a design that transcends their expectations, and covers the busiest areas of commercial practice: print, advertising, packaging, signage, web design and many more. Real-world examples are analysed, and there is a wealth of technical information on every aspect of the design process.

Nothing catches the eye like an appropriate, well-drawn illustration and digital technology has transformed the potential for their use in commercial and media contexts. High quality illustrations are constantly in demand and a designer with a sure grasp of digital illustration will find their skills invaluable. This practical volume offers sound advice to anyone who needs to create digital illustrations, manipulate existing images, or work in 3D or moving illustrations. The work of leading professionals is analysed, and real-world examples are broken down: there are chapters on digital painting, digital drawing and professional practice. With Illustration Pocket Essentials, students, artists and graphic designers alike will create stunning illustrations fit for any purpose.

This book presents creepy creatures and characters from ancient times and is a great giftbook for all fans of monsters and myths aged 8 and over. Purporting to be a school notebook found on the pavement, the pages reveal the stories of such thrilling and little-known creatures as the huge Teumessian Fox (who was turned to stone by Zeus), Echidna (mother of many, many monsters), hundred-headed Briaereus (who was also a handful), and Typhon (who threw mountains around as if they were beanbags). My Monster Notebook offers a peek at a bunch of creatures you definitely would not want to run into, brought to vivid life by someone who accidentally dropped his (or her) lovingly put together notebook. Fortunately, we found it!

Spectacular, mysterious, elegant, or grotesque, the vertebrate skeletons of Earth's fossil record carry within them the traces of several billion years of life. Evolution in Action, a resounding success on its initial publication in 2007, is a unique and beautiful attempt to provide a map of those billion years in time. Now updated and presented in a smaller format with seventeen new utterly distinctive photographs, this book steps beyond the debate and presents the undeniable truth of Darwin's theory, showing through 200 photographs of skeletons both obscure and commonplace, but always intriguing, the process by which life has transformed itself, again and again.

In 1931, Diego Rivera was the subject of The Museum of Modern Art's second monographic exhibition, which set new attendance records in its five-week run. The Museum brought Rivera to New York six weeks before the show's opening and gave him on-site studio space. There he produced five portable murals — large blocks of frescoed plaster, slaked lime and wood that feature bold images drawn from Mexican subject matter and address themes of revolution and class inequity. After the opening, to great publicity, Rivera added three more murals, now taking on New York subjects through monumental images of the urban working class and the city during the Great Depression. Published in conjunction with an exhibition that brings together key works made for Rivera's 1931 show, this catalogue casts the artist as a highly cosmopolitan figure who traveled between Russia, Mexico and the United States and examines the intersection of artmaking and radical politics in the 1930s. Illustrated with reproductions of each panel as well as related paintings, drawings, prints and documentary photographs, the book's essays investigate the international politics of muralism, Rivera's history with MoMA, the iconography of the portable murals and technical aspects of the artist's working process. Diego Rivera (1886-1957) was a central figure in the development of Mexican muralism, an ambitious public art initiative intended to relay Mexico's ideals after the Revolution (1910-1920). A highly cosmopolitan artist, Rivera had spent many years in Europe before returning to Mexico in 1921, and in 1927 he traveled to the Soviet Union where he met Alfred Barr, the soon-to-be founding director of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Rivera's artistic celebrity benefitted from major commissions in the United States, including murals for the Pacific Stock Exchange, the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, MoMA and the Detroit Institute of Arts. By the 1930s, he enjoyed an unrivaled status at the center of international debates about public art and politics...

The greening of facades with plants gives a piece of nature back to the city. But a green facade is much more than a charming view: Thanks to its insulating effect, it evens out extreme swings in temperature, protects against UV radiation and improves sound insulation. In that regard one does not have to always rely on the usual ivy. Other evergreen or fruit bearing plants and even exotic flowers can be used as facade decoration. In that way varied and creative greening can be created which lend a colorful aesthetic tone to the cityscape. The 50 projects presented here give an overview of this current trend in landscape architecture.

This unique visual reference guide will be an invaluable resource to professional designers from architects to illustrators, production designers, art directors, decorators, film concept artists, sculptors and painters. It uses colour photographs to illustrate a wide range of locations and styles of architecture throughout Egypt, particularly highlighting universal architectural elements that may be incorporated into a variety of designs and styles including arches, doorways, windows, balconies, wall finishes and more. Photographic plates of modern and ancient Egypt, showing markets, buildings, temples, tombs and daily life are cross-referenced with enlarged details and grouped for functional comparisons to cater to the various approaches a designer may take from conception to completion. With some 1,000 colour illustrations, thorough referencing and detailed observation, this book will serve a very specific need while also appealing to a wider audience as a visual celebration of many aspects of Egypt, familiar and unfamiliar.

Clusters of white cottages huddled between hills of an unbelievably rich green, villages of a single street, dazzling in their array of color washes and picturesque shop-fronts-such are the villages of Ireland, which to this day are living working communities. The most beautiful of these villages are captured here in Christopher Fitz-Simon's sensitive commentaries and Hugh Palmer's evocative photographs. This is a journey full of rural gems, some famous, others less so. Here are the colored coastal villages of Cork, their vibrant houses sloping down to a sea that so many Irish people crossed to found other communities in America. Here too are the stunning medieval churches of Roscommon and Galway; and the villages of Antrim, standing ruggedly in defiance of the northern seas.

First published in 1991, this book traces the history of glassmaking from its origins in Western Asia some 5000 years ago, through the invention of glassblowing around the first century BC, to the introduction of mechanised processes and new styles in the 19th and 20th centuries. It highlights the flourishing industries of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, the extraordinary achievements of the Roman Empire, the elegant vessels of the Islamic Near East, the superb mastery of Renaissance Venice and the wide-ranging experiments of modern Europe and America. A special feature of the book is the series of photographic sequences specially taken in the studio of a modern glassmaker as he reconstructs ancient techniques. With an all new final chapter by John P. Smith, Editor of The Glass Circle journal, to bring the book right up to date with the latest developments, 5000 Years of Glass is still the definitive single-volume general history of this most versatile art form.

Works of art make a substantial contribution to cultural identification. When they are placed in a public place this function is enhanced. However the artworks also acknowledge other tasks: they figuratively announce content in their traditional role, standing as the image of a ruler or at least serve as decoration, while in the Modern period they become increasingly space defining or shaping. In this volume around 150 works present the history of this species of art. By referring to important contemporary works, the development of contemporary art in public places during the last decades, which dominates the volume with about 350 examples, can be traced. Succinct texts locating the work, the artist and the style, concentrate on what is special about the works and explain the effect they have every day on passers-by according to Paul Watzlawick's axiom that One can not not communicate.

Creative Space looks at the studios, apartments, and homes of the designers, directors, stylists, artists, graffiti writers, curators, novelists and innovators who are pushing the boundaries of contemporary culture. These are interiors created by people who shop in Colette in Paris, live on the Lower East Side in New York and travel to Tokyo. The domestic spaces are often DIY and strongly reflect pop culture. Filled with post-modern pop collectables, vintage junk finds, camouflage and graffiti, clothing and toy collections, contemporary art resting in bookshelves and crammed onto walls, these homes are an antidote to the sterility of minimalism. Among the 30 homes featured in the book are those of artist Julie Verhoeven and Maharishi founder Hardy Blechmann in London, graffiti artist Fafi in Paris, artists Ryan McGinness and Wes Lang in New York, innovative creatives Jaybo and Lucio Auri in Berlin, Barcelona filmmaker Roger Gual, and in Tokyo cult photographer Yasumasa Yonehara and artist Aya Takano. In a new compact format and at a very special price, this book will provide ideas and inspiration to all those who want to make their own creative space.

Beckett is the result of a little-known encounter that took place over 30 years ago in Tangiers, between the then-burgeoning photographer Francois-Marie Banier and the great Irish-born writer Samuel Beckett. Banier kept spotting Beckett's iconically gaunt and tapering frame — a marsh-bird vanished in the middle of the crowd of Moroccans in djellabahs and indifferent tourists — and was so entranced by his curious movements and features that he determined to photograph him. Of course when they finally met Banier forgot all about his camera, preferring instead to listen to Beckett's tales of the 27 books he couldn't find a publisher for, of his wife Suzanne, of his friendship with Joyce, of his family in Ireland. Eventually recovering his photographer's eye, Banier stepped back behind the camera to take this fantastic sequence of photographs, published here for the first time, and unmatched as a portrait of the great writer.

French painter Alexandre Cabanel is famous for his entrancingly beautiful The Birth of Venus. Since its purchase by Napoleon III in 1863, it remains among the foremost attractions at Paris's Musee d'Orsay. Yet as familiar as The Birth of Venus has become — gracing countless posters, art prints, and collectibles — it is but one of the many stunning images Cabanel created in the course of his remarkable career. Produced in conjunction with an exhibition at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne and the Musee Fabre in Montpellier, Alexandre Cabanel: The Tradition of Beauty is the first retrospective to deal comprehensively with the breadth of Cabanel's oeuvre. As a successor to the classical tradition embodied by the likes of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, Cabanel was a frequent participant at the Paris Salons and forged a highly successful career with his skilled portraiture as well as his many historical and mythological paintings, many of which feature the artist's trademark abundance of pale, naked flesh. A remarkable retrospective of one of the leading French painters of the nineteenth century, this beautifully printed volume — designed by renowned fashion designer Christian Lacroix — presents sixty stunning works from Cabanel's brilliant career.

Why do some colour combinations soothe, and others repel? How can you grab attention, while remaining tasteful? How can you learn from the history of art and use that knowledge in todays digital world? Possibly the most powerful tool in the designers armoury, colour is also the most difficult to understand and use successfully. Colour in Design Pocket Essentials demystifies colour theories and systems, before looking at how we live with colour, and use it creatively. The challenges of digital colour management are also covered, and the book is illustrated throughout with real-world examples of colour in use. With Colour in Design Pocket Essentials , you will be able to transform the way your work is perceived whether its interior design, advertising or printed media.

Peripatetic Chanel head designer, book publisher, photographer — and now, film director — Karl Lagerfeld founded Metiers d'Arts in 2002 to showcase the talents of Chanel's seven specialist ateliers (that provide the couture house with costume jewelry, embroidery and millinery). This volume focuses on Chanel's 2008-2009 Metiers d'Arts collection Paris-Moscow. If Paris-Moscow indulges Lagerfeld's fascination for Russia through fashion, then Russian Connection is that fascination embodied in book form. Lagerfeld's images evoke Imperial Russia, Constructivism, Catherine the Great, Faberge, Russian folklore and Coco Chanel's own passion for Russia, via the great Ballets Russes, Byzantine jewelry and her affair with the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich. Included here is a DVD featuring Lagerfeld's directorial debut, Coco 1913/Chanel 1923, a silent black-and-white film depicting Chanel's flirtation with Russian-Parisian emigre society in the 1910s and 1920s.

Famous all over the world for his composite heads made up of plants, fruit and animals, Arcimboldo still remains, paradoxically, a painter shrouded in mystery. This important monograph proposes to reveal the eclecticism of one of the most fertile and lively minds of the Mannerist period, placing him in the cultural context in which he lived and worked. In addition to the artist's anamorphic heads, this volume includes an important selection of his paintings (among which, numerous previously unpublished portraits), tapestries, drawings and illustrations, realised throughout his life, from the period of his training in Lombardy to his time at the Hapsburg court.

No one in the twentieth century created more instantly recognizable images than Cartier-Bresson. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was perhaps the finest and most influential image maker of the twentieth century, and his portraits are among his best-known work. Over a fifty year period, he photographed some of the most eminent personalities of the era, as well as ordinary people, chosen as subjects because of their striking and unusual features. In 2003, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, which was created to provide a permanent home for his collected works, opened in Paris. This book is published to coincide with the first exhibition at the Fondation that is drawn entirely from those archives, and it features both well-known images and previously unpublished portraits. Each portrait has been chosen because it perfectly embodies Cartier-Bresson's description of what he was attempting to communicate in his photographs: I'm seeking above all an inner silence. I am trying to translate the personality and not an expression. The portraits reproduced here — discreet, without artifice, their subjects frozen in time — confirm once more the singular gift of Cartier-Bresson who instinctively knew in which revealing fraction of a second to click the shutter. 100 illustrations.

Here is a lively and lighthearted survey that looks at the role that old and classic fonts from letterpress to slab serifs and beyond play in contemporary graphic design. Written and compiled by the worlds leading graphic-design historian, the book provides hundreds of examples, as well as informed texts that will entertain, edify and inspire a new generation of students and practitioners to appreciate that the past contains typographic riches for the future.