Getting messy is the best part of creating! Get Messy Art gives you the freedom, inspiration, and ideas to experiment and play with art techniques and projects to create perfectly imperfect art. We're always told that play and experimentation is the foundation of growing as an artist. But where do you start? Where to find new techniques to try? How do you bring them all together? Get Messy Art has all the guidance, instruction, and inspiration you need. Based on the popular online class and community website Get Messy Art, this book brings together tons of creative art techniques and projects, including painting with watercolor and acrylic, mark-making, drawing with markers and pen and ink, sketching faces, and much more. The fun doesn't stop there. You'll also learn how to make your own art journals and trendy junk journals-easy handmade books to work in that are personalized and one of a kind. In Get Messy Art you'll discover: A welcoming environment that encourages play and experimentation, to help you become the artist you always wanted to be. How to use no-rules, no-stress art techniques as a creative outlet to express feelings. Actionable inspiration that will keep you going, even when motivation is scarce. Fresh techniques that will show you innovative ways to use low-cost supplies such as paint and mediums, stencils, pens, and paper. Easy background techniques that will get you started and banish fear of the blank page. The satisfaction of making your own unique journals using simple methods. Ultimately, art is all about creating for the sake of creating. It's powerful, it's cathartic, it's messy-and it's all yours. It's time to get messy!

"The Art of Letter Carving in Stone" portrays the beauty of this age-old craft alongside practical instruction. Written by an eminent practitioner and teacher, it guides the novice through the basics of letter carving, drawn lettering and making simple designs, and for the more experienced it explains a new proportioning system for classical Roman capitals and demonstrates a useful approach to designing letterform variations. Topics covered include the development of twentieth-century letter carving; detailed instruction for V-incising the key strokes of letters; drawing a range of alphabets for use in letter carving; making inscriptions, gilding and painting letters and finally, designing headstones and plaques, house names and poetry texts. This beautiful book illustrates a wide range of exciting and creative pieces, and celebrates the inspiring work of contemporary letter carvers.

Tales of life, death and lettuce in a French garden. Two men, both advancing in years, converse deep in the French countryside. One is an artist, the other his gardener. On finishing his work, the gardener enters the studio and looks over the artist's shoulder. As the artist draws, the gardener talks: about his youth, his family, his travels, his health, and, of course, the pleasures of gardening. Sometimes the artist responds, sometimes he just listens; but, all the while the bond between these two very different men is deepening. Their growing friendship produces many moments of dry humour: when the gardener visits the artist in Paris, he brings an anvil along in his luggage; the pair go to the forest on a mission to steal a twenty- foot fir tree; they marvel at the curious habits of local characters, and ponder whether a modern-day Jesus would take a job on the railway. There are moments of profundity, too, when the two friends reflect on their own mortality, and the equally taxing question of whether a lettuce can be as beautiful as a painting.

The strange cries heard at night in a dilapidated penitentiary, the glimpse of a `White Lady' floating through a graveyard, the face at the window in a room that has been locked for decades - stories of hauntings never cease to intrigue us. From palaces to prisons, from an 11th century chateau in France to 'The Island of the Dolls' in Mexico City, Haunted Places features the world's most fascinating spooky locations. Some hauntings are recent, others are ancient, but all the stories are striking: from the deceased monks who pace the boundaries of a ruined former priory, to the lift operator in a Canadian hotel still working his shift decades after he died, to the infamous Vlad the Impaler, who haunts a Romanian castle where he was imprisoned for seven years. With tales of the `Mad Old Woman' who searches Highgate cemetery in London for the children she supposedly murdered to strange laughter heard at night, from apparitions to floating orbs to radios suddenly changing station, Haunted Places features 150 outstanding photographs of haunted sites. Each eerie photograph is accompanied by a caption explaining the story of the haunting, from tragic accidents to brutal murders, from executions to disease and other sorrowful endings.