This collection of artwork from European comics master Sergio Toppi focuses on illustrations of beasts both real and imaginary presented in Toppi's inimitable pen-and-ink style. Sergio Toppi's work has been hailed as an influence by such artistic masters as Sean Gordon Murphy and Walter Simonson.

Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) was one of the leading British landscape painters of the 19th century. Inspired by his mentor, the artist and poet William Blake, Palmer brought a new spiritual intensity to his interpretation of nature, producing works of unprecedented boldness and fervency. Pre-eminent scholar William Vaughan-who organized the Palmer retrospective at the British Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005-draws on unpublished diaries and letters, offering a fresh interpretation of one of the most attractive and sympathetic, yet idiosyncratic, figures of the 19th century. Far from being a recluse, as he is often presented, Palmer was actively engaged in Victorian cultural life and sought to exert a moral power through his artwork. Beautifully illustrated with Palmer's visionary and enchanted landscapes, the book contains rich studies of his work, influences, and resources. Vaughan also shows how later, enthralled by the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Palmer manipulated his own artistic image to harmonize with it. Little appreciated in his lifetime, Palmer is now hailed as a precursor of modernism in the 20th century. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

In this reissue of his popular book, Vic Bearcroft shares his love of drawing and painting wild animals, showing how to capture the personality and distinctive features of a variety of creatures. Using simple steps and plenty of detail, this guide shows you how to create beautiful artworks, from drawing the basic shapes through to realising your favourite animals in your preferred medium.

"Vanishing Ice" introduces the rich artistic legacy of the planet's frozen frontiers now threatened by a changing climate. Tracing the impact of glaciers, icebergs, and fields of ice on artists' imaginations, this interdisciplinary survey explores the connections between generations of artists who adopt different styles, media, and approaches to interpret alpine and polar landscapes.

Beginning in the eighteenth century, collaborations between the arts and sciences contributed to a deeper understanding of snowcapped mountains, the Arctic, and Antarctica. A resurgence of interest in these environments as dramatic indicators of climate change galvanizes contemporary expeditions to the glaciers and the poles. Today, artists, writers, and scientists awaken the world to both the beauty and increasing vulnerability of ice.

Barbara C. Matilsky is curator of art at the Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, Washington. She is the author of numerous books, including "Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary Artists' Interpretations and Solutions."

Explore the deserts, mountains and souks of the Middle East, with best-selling author and artist David Bellamy. Following on from David's highly acclaimed Arctic Light, this book provides an intriguing and often entertaining insight into South Arabia and the Swahili Coast, Jordan, Lebanon and Oman. It describes the history, culture, customs and geography of the region and the daily life of its inhabitants, as viewed through the eyes of a world-renowned watercolour artist and life-long adventurer. Filled with personal anecdotes and humour, David Bellamy's unique account shines a light on the Middle East and highlights the incredible beauty and fascinating culture of this much-neglected region. David's stunning artwork, that he painted during his various expeditions, features throughout the book and captures perfectly the diverse and majestic nature of the region. Watercolourists will be inspired by the author's awe-inspiring ability to depict sweeping vistas and create a sense of space in his paintings, and to capture the very essence of a place through his art.

Art Wolfe has been photographing nature and wildlife to wide acclaim for 25 years, but his most recent book takes a new approach. Recognizing the crucial interdependence between animal life and the environment, Wolfe focuses on this relationship. As he says, "An animal ... within its habitat is a vibrant representation of natural selection". The Living Wild offers breathtaking evidence of this.

Wolfe traveled three years to capture these rare, soaring images, from Mongolia to Australia to Iceland and beyond. The result is a rich pictorial tour of a magnificent array of animals, from "charismatic" beasts like the giant panda and the lowland gorilla, to a stunning display of birds, to such unsung contributors to the ecology as insects. Complementing the images are essays by renowned conservationists, such as Jane Goodall, who document the increasingly tenuous state of earth's biodiversity and suggest ways to strengthen it.

In 1559 and 1561, the Antwerp print publisher Hieronymus Cock issued an unprecedented series of landscape prints known today simply as the Small Landscapes. The forty-four prints included in the series offer views of the local countryside surrounding Antwerp in simple, unembellished compositions. At a time when vast panoramic and allegorical landscapes dominated the art market, the Small Landscapes represent a striking innovation. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the significance of the Small Landscapes in early modern print culture. It charts a diachronic history of the series over the century it was in active circulation, from 1559 to the middle of the seventeenth century. Adopting the lifespan of the prints as the framework of the study, Alexandra Onuf analyzes the successive states of the plates and the changes to the series as a whole in order to reveal the shifting artistic and contextual valences of the images at their different moments and places of publication. This unique case study allows for a new perspective on the trajectory of print publishing over the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries across multiple publishing houses, highlighting the seminal importance of print publishers in the creation and dissemination of visual imagery and cultural ideas. Looking at other visual materials and contemporary sources - including texts as diverse as humanist poetry and plays, agricultural manuals, polemical broadsheets, and peasant songs - Onuf situates the Small Landscapes within the larger cultural discourse on rural land and the meaning of the local in the turbulent early modern Netherlands. The study focuses new attention on the active and reciprocal intersections between printed pictures and broader cultural, economic and political phenomena.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cat is a book of more than 20 influential artists reimagined as artistic felines. From Frida Catlo to Yayoi Catsama, Wassily Catdinski to Henri Catisse, each portrait of the artist as a young cat is accompanied by a clever tongue-in-cheek biography revealing the thrilling feline lives (all nine) behind their famed artwork. Loaded with clever cat puns, this playful romp through art history will twist the whiskers of any cat-loving creative, whether you're discovering the inspiration for Frida Catlo's renowned self-pawtraits to reflecting on the catmosphere that gave rise to Georgia O'Kitty's landscapes. * Features fantastic feline artists such as Mary Catsatt and Meow Weiwei * A cute and clever little book that cat and art lovers alike will love * Packed with tons of real biographical info about each artist and plentiful cat puns For cat lovers with an artistic purr-suasion, this is the ultimate celebration of their favorite artists. * A purrfectly smart and sweet gift book for cat lovers, art lovers, pun enthusiasts, and those who love them * Great for those who loved Fat Cat Art by Svetlana Petrova, Cats Galore by Susan Herbert, Of Cats and Men: Profiles of History's Great Cat-Loving Artists, Writers, Thinkers and Statesmen by Sam Kalda

This notebook features a beautiful cover illustration by acclaimed nature artist Jane Smith. It contains 192 pages of lined paper, head-and-tail bans, a ribbon marker and band to keep it securely fastened.

With the imagination of a writer and the eye of an artist, Michael Korda doodled on the backs of old manuscripts in his tackroom while his wife, Margaret, was out riding. They loved and acquired cats-a habit written about previously in their book, Cat People-and the few in residence at this time would serve as inspiration for the drawings. These are no ordinary cat illustrations, though. Korda's cats read newspapers and books; go ice skating in the small country town where they live; comfort Margaret's horse, Monty, after a stressful vet visit; sell fried mice at the Farmer's Market, and undertake (on paper, at least) whatever fanciful endeavours their keeper conjures up. The result is a collection of magical pieces, filled with joy, that represent a year in the life of a couple in love with one another, and certainly with their cats.

True beauty is found in nature, making this the perfect sketch book for your art inspiration! As if being responsible for dazzling sunsets and the aurora borealis were not enough, nature is also guardian to the universal principals of design. With mathematical perfection, its recurring structures seem to magically adapt as they show up in hundreds of ways: the radial star at the center of snowflakes, fruits and flowers, and the arms of starfish; spirals at the heart of nautilus shells, unfurling plants, and swirling storm systems. Borrowing the beauty of nature's forms can help you create beautiful artwork. Observing the structure of nature's forms can help you to be a better designer. The inspiration is limitless. Nature's design magic is a balancing act found in its perfect ratios. The sections of this sketchbook--Star, Branch, Spiral, and Fan--focus on four of those disceptively simple design principles and why they work. Author/artist Yellena James uses her own nature-based drawings to guide readers toward looking closely at each design form and the places where it occurs. Readers will discover ways to use each form in their own artwork, realistically, abstractly, or as motifs in repeat borders and patterns. In a non-academic fashion, the text explains nature's beautiful balances, and the art of using them when you draw and design.

"Her stunning images push boundaries and feature portraits of a wonderfully diverse selection of strong, bold people of all ages, races, and body types." - Loeidela Photographie "Inspirational, feminine and colourful..." - Flair Mode Magazin "...[pays] homage to all these forms of beauty that our society struggles to recognize".-Costanza Spina, Lense Alexandra Sophie is a French artist and renowned fashion and fine art photographer. Her work is described as sensual, fresh, and feminine, often entwining humans with nature. Alexandra Sophie's powerful and award-winning photographic work narrates stories on being human, the human being in environmental contexts - interwoven through floral themes - and explores identity through subjects such as sexuality, feminism, and interrogations on what constitutes the "normal" frontier. Alexandra's award-winning photography has gained international recognition, featuring collaborations and covers with high-fashion clientele, such as Swarovski, Cacharel, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Elle, and Harper's Bazaar UK, among many others; in 2018 Forbes named her as one to watch in its 30Under30 Europe profile. This highly illustrated book, which will include a preface written by Nathalie Colin (former Creative Director at Swarovski), comprises a lavish and rich portfolio of Alexandra's photographic portraits that is inspirational, beautiful, contemporary, and colourful. Her stunning images push boundaries and feature portraits of a wonderfully diverse selection of strong, bold people of all ages, races, and body types.

I lift up my eyes to the mountains-where does my help come from? My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth. -Psalm 121:1-2The mountains can seem like heaven on earth-the peace, the freshness, the grandeur. Devotions from the Mountains invites you to spend a quiet moment in reflection each day, finding peace and drawing closer to God-the Creator of heaven and earth. Inside you'll find 90 inspirational readings, Scripture verses, prayers, and breathtaking imagery of God's mountain handiwork sculpted and brought to life by His hand.Lift your eyes to the mountains. Be refreshed and inspired at our amazing God who is more majestic than the mountains and yet cares for every detail of your life.

Elizabeth Sutton, using a phenomenological approach, investigates how animals in art invite viewers to contemplate human relationships to the natural world. Using Rembrandt van Rijn's etching of The Presentation in the Temple (c. 1640), Joseph Beuys's social sculpture I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), archaic rock paintings at Horseshoe Canyon, Canyonlands National Park, and examples from contemporary art, this book demonstrates how artists across time and cultures employed animals to draw attention to the sensory experience of the composition and reflect upon the shared sensory awareness of the world.

A revelatory look at how the mature work of Caspar David Friedrich engaged with concurrent developments in natural science and philosophy Best known for his atmospheric landscapes featuring contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies and morning mists, Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) came of age alongside a German Romantic philosophical movement that saw nature as an organic and interconnected whole. The naturalists in his circle believed that observations about the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms could lead to conclusions about human life. Many of Friedrich's often-overlooked later paintings reflect his engagement with these philosophical ideas through a focus on isolated shrubs, trees, and rocks. Others revisit earlier compositions or iconographic motifs but subtly metamorphose the previously distinct human figures into the natural landscape. In this revelatory book, Nina Amstutz combines fresh visual analysis with broad interdisciplinary research to investigate the intersection of landscape painting, self-exploration, and the life sciences in Friedrich's mature work. Drawing connections between the artist's anthropomorphic landscape forms and contemporary discussions of biology, anatomy, morphology, death, and decomposition, Amstutz brings Friedrich's work into the larger discourse surrounding art, nature, and life in the 19th century.

The paintings of Paul Feiler (1918-2013), the focus of this first survey of the artist's life and career, were inspired by the English landscape, particularly the cliffs and inlets of the coast of south-west Cornwall. For his friend Peter Lanyon, Feiler's early works provided him with a sense of 'calm and I mean a sense of pause...To achieve that repose in the landscape I know one has to suffer the opposite.' Feiler's vision was based on the understanding that 'you stand vertically and you look horizontally'; through this he aimed to fulfil Cezanne's requirement that 'a picture should give us...an abyss in which the eye is lost.' He moved from painterly abstraction to an exploration of the elusive nature of space through the effects of narrow bands of colour, silver and gold in a pattern of square and circle, which he varied and developed over more than forty years. Based on full access to the artist's archive of letters, catalogues and photographs, Michael Raeburn describes how Feiler overcame many painful early experiences to achieve the meditative serenity of his deeply spiritual work. For all those interested in the history of modern British painting, this is a much-needed resource.