Design creative characters inspired by real people. Let Mike Mattesi show you how to use life drawing to discover the poses, features and personalities which form the basis of character and then build, develop and 'PUSH' your drawings to new heights of dramatic and visual impact for believable characters audiences can relate to.

Packed with color illustrations and photographs of the models who inspired them. With step-by-step explanation of how the characters were developed and exercises for you to sharpen your skills this is everything you need to bring your characters to life.

Table of Contents

Key Concepts

- Fear

- Risk

- Opinion

- Hierarchy

- Contrast and Affinity

Force with Character

- Amazing angles

- Developing ideas

Space with Character

- Spatial Bounding Box

- Playing with depth

- Forced perspective

- Ratio

Size

- Overlap

- Creating flat design

Shape with Character

- Straight to Curve Design

- Forceful Triangle

- The Brilliant Bounding Box

- Seeing ratios through Hierarchy

- Facial Ratios

- The law of Thirds

Costume with Character

- Tonal Theory

- Color theory

- Imaginative Designs

Reportage with Character

- Using forced perspective

- The character behind architecture

- Forcing the stories

Animals with Character

- Pulling character out of animals

Both an exploration of the ways in which we fashion our public identity and a manual of modern sociability, this lively and readable book explores the techniques we use to present ourselves to the world: body language, tone of voice, manners, demeanor, "personality" and personal style. Drawing on historical commentators from Castiglione to Machiavelli, and from Marcel Mauss to Roland Barthes, Joanne Finkelstein also looks to popular visual culture, including Hollywood film and makeover TV, to show how it provides blueprints for the successful construction of "persona." Finkelstein's interest here is not in the veracity of the self - recently dissected by critical theory - but rather in the ways in which we style this "self," in the enduring appeal of the "new you" and in our fascination with deception, fraudulent personalities and impostors. She also discusses the role of fashion and of status symbols and how advertising sells these to us in our never ending quest for social mobility.

These instructional drawing books have a highly visual and practical approach. With the aid of step-by-step drawings, the authors - all professional artists or teachers - explain clearly and concisely how to use pencil, pen and ink, Conte and charcoal.
The series covers a comprehensive range of popular subjects and each title contains sections on materials, composition, perspective and different drawing techinques - both traditional and innovative.

Michelangelo's art is exhilarating, but also bewildering. What is the source of his incomparable power? In this bold and absorbing study, the art critic James Hall explores the body-language of Michelangelo's figures, and his preoccupation with the male nude. He answers many of the major puzzles - his stern Madonnas and their lack of maternal feeling; his concern with colossal scale and size; his passion for anatomical dissection; the meaning of the drawings made for his young lover Tommaso da Cavalieri. By asking basic questions about Michelangelo and his times, Hall sheds dramatic new light on many of his most familiar works, including the statue of David, the narratives of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and his haunting late images of the dead Christ. This book re-assesses the popular idea of Michelangelo as an artist-superman possessed of titanic mental and physical powers, and the long-held view of him as brilliant but unbalanced, obsessed with the male nude. Hall sees him as the first artist to put the unadorned human body centre stage, giving him a profound relevance to our own time, in which visual artists and writers are so fixated on 'the body'. If we really want to understand our own culture, he argues, we need to understand Michelangelo. This compelling new study offers us a way to do so.

This special issue of Paragraph, Volume 26 Numbers 1 and 2, brings together differing approaches (from a diverse range of disciplines) to the question of the representation of men's bodies in twentieth-century visual culture - from art photography and cinema to popular culture, advertising and pornography. These are bodies of different colours, nationalities, sexualities, ages, which are available to be gazed upon by many different consumers even though the location of the different images may condition both who looks and how they look.

During the course of the 19th century, a relatively modern medium entered the private space of Iranian houses of the wealthy and became a popular feature of interior design in Persia. This was print media - lithographed images on paper and postcards - and their subject was European women. These idealised images adorned houses across the country throughout the Qajar period and this trend was particularly fashionable in Isfahan and mural decorations at the entrance gate of the Qaysarieh bazaar. The interest in images of Western women was an unusual bi-product of Iran's early political and cultural encounters with the West. In a world where women were rarely seen in public and, even then, were heavily veiled, the notion of European women dressed in - by Iranian standards - elegant and revealing clothing must have sparked much curiosity and some titillation among well-to-do merchants and aristocrats who felt the need to create some association, however remote, with these alien creatures. The introduction of such images began during the Safavid era in the 17th century with frescoes in royal palaces. This spread to other manifestations in the form of tile work and porcelain in the Qajar era, which became a testament to the popularity of this visual phenomenon among Iran's urban elite in the 19th and early 20th century. Parviz Tanavoli, the prominent Iranian artist and sculptor, here brings together the definitive collection of these unique images. European Women in Persian Houses will be essential for collectors and enthusiasts interested in Iranian art, culture and social history.

The social problem of infant abandonment captured the public's imagination in Italy during the fifteenth century, a critical period of innovation and development in charitable discourses. As charity toward foundlings became a political priority, the patrons and supporters of foundling hospitals turned to visual culture to help them make their charitable work understandable to a wide audience. Focusing on four institutions in central Italy that possess significant surviving visual and archival material, Visual Cultures of Foundling Care in Renaissance Italy examines the discursive processes through which foundling care was identified, conceptualized, and promoted. The first book to consider the visual culture of foundling hospitals in Renaissance Italy, this study looks beyond the textual evidence to demonstrate that the institutional identities of foundling hospitals were articulated by means of a wide variety of visual forms, including book illumination, altarpieces, fresco cycles, institutional insignia, processional standards, prints, and reliquaries. The author draws on fields as diverse as art history, childhood studies, the history of charity, Renaissance studies, gender studies, sociology, and the history of religion to elucidate the pivotal role played by visual culture in framing and promoting the charitable succor of foundlings.

Though portraits of old women mediate cultural preoccupations just as effectively as those of younger women, the scant published research on images of older women belies their significance within early modern Italy. This study examines the remarkable flowering, largely overlooked in portraiture scholarship to date, of portraits of old women in Northern Italy and especially Bologna during the second half of the sixteenth century, when, as a result of religious reform, the lives of women and the family came under increasing scrutiny. Old Women and Art in the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior draws on a wide range of primary visual sources, including portraits, religious images, architectural views, prints and drawings, as well as extant palazzi and case, furnishings, and domestic objects created by the leading artists in Bologna, including Lavinia Fontana, Bartolomeo Passerotti, Denys Calvaert, and the Carracci. The study also draws on an array of historical sources - including sixteenth-century theories of portraiture, prescriptive writings on women and the family, philosophical and practical treatises on the home economy, sumptuary legislation, books of secrets, prescriptive writings on old age, and household inventories - to provide new historical perspectives on the domestic life of the propertied classes in Bologna during the period. Author Erin Campbell contends that these images of unidentified women are not only crucial to our understanding of the cultural operations of art within the early modern world, but also, by working from the margins to revise the center, provide an opportunity to present new conceptual frameworks and question our assumptions about old age, portraiture, and the domestic interior.

A recently discovered plaster of Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen is critically challenging our understanding of Edgar Degas' most famous work. Documentary and technical evidence confirm that the plaster was cast from Degas' Little Dancer before the wax sculpture was extensively reworked after 1903. The plaster thus records Degas' wax as it appeared when it shocked the Parisian art world at the sixth Impressionist exhibition of 1881. It reveals a far more revolutionary work than the reworked Little Dancer wax and the posthumous Hebrard bronzes we know today. The plaster shows why Joris-Karl Huysmans, in 1881, raved that Degas' Little Dancer was "the only truly modern attempt I know of in sculpture" and why the work left Whistler in a state of near delirium. The plaster reveals Degas at his most innovative by introducing a radical idea of posing a lowly 'opera rat' as a revered figure by giving her an iconic pose, then locking her into a square vitrine, thus emphasizing her symmetrical, four-sided stance. It is now clear that in his Little Dancer Degas anticipated radical ideas that came to define key aspects of modern art, dramatically impacting his most noted peers, including Whistler, Manet, Seurat and Sargent. Even twentieth-century masterpieces by Duchamp, Giacometti, Oldenburg, Warhol and Hirst reflect, albeit indirectly, Degas' masterful innovations."

The first English-language publication of a classic French book on the relationship between the development of photography and of the medical category of hysteria. In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in the invention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacher and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpetriere identified as hysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visual proof of hysteria's specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book, provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere. As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objective documentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical "type"-they performed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in the purgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of the incurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted to presentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot's "Tuesday Lectures." Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Through techniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, he instigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatred and resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity to antipathy in one of Charcot's favorite "cases," that of Augustine, whose image crops up again and again in the Iconographie. Augustine's virtuosic performance of hysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy, crucifixion, and silent cries.

Closely examining staged images of Japanese femininity, this study centers on the mid-Meiji souvenir photography of Kusakabe Kimbei, approaching from the artist's perspective while referencing his culture's visual and traditional practices. The analysis attempts to construe visual material in its original context using various points of departure, including the sociocultural significance of the staged models, the visual display of the photographic models in relation to the visibility problem of Japanese women in Meiji visual media, and Kimbei's visual encodings of Japanese femininity. By means of contextualized analysis, this survey seeks to illuminate the intricate structure of significations embedded on the visual plane, ultimately demonstrating how Kimbei's female images present a locus of multilayered meanings.