All artists are tired of persuading their nearest and dearest to look sad...look glad...look mad...madder...no, even madder...okay, hold it. For those artists (and their long-suffering friends), here is the best book ever. FACIAL EXPRESSIONS includes more than 3,500 photographs of fifty faces, men and women of a variety of ages, shapes, sizes, and ethnicities, each demonstrating a wide range of emotions and shown from multiple angles. Who can use this book? Oh, only every artist on the planet, including art students, illustrators, fine artists, animators, story boarders, and comic-book artists. But wait, there's more! Additional photos focus on people wearing hats and couples kissing. while illustrations show skull anatomy and facial musculature. Still not enough? How about a one-of-a-kind series of photos of lips pronouncing the phonemes used in human speech? Animators will swoon--and artists will show a range of facial expressions from happy to happiest to ecstatic.

Creating Stylized Characters gives readers a valuable insight into the popular art of character design. Professional illustrators, animators and cartoonists, well versed in creating characters for video games, comics and film, guide the reader through accessible tutorial projects packed with images and advice. Any budding artist will soon be able to draw characters of all ages, shapes and sizes! This entertaining, beginner-friendly book is applicable to both digital and traditional media, and delves into many essential aspects of the character development process, from real-world research, to sketching gestures and poses, to exploring different genres, personalities and styles.

Stephen Rogers Peck's Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist remains unsurpassed as a manual for students. It includes sections on bones, muscles, surface anatomy, proportion, equilibrium, and locomotion. Other unique features are sections on the types of human physique, anatomy from birth to old age, an orientation on racial anatomy, and an analysis of facial expressions. The wealth of information offered by the Atlas ensures its place as a classic for the study of the human form.

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.

This is the first scholarly study to focus on satirical prints of women in the late eighteenth century. The period c.1760-1800 was the golden age of graphic satire: thousands of copper-plate engravings, humorous and/or critical in tone, were published. They were sold in London and the provinces and exported overseas, and were viewed by nearly all sections of the population. These prints both reflected and sought to shape contemporary debate about the role of women in society. While attitudes varied considerably, the general consensus was that women were more visible in society than ever before - on the streets, on the stage, on the walls of the Royal Academy, on the hustings, and in the pleasure gardens. The satirical prints of the period reveal perceptions of women and their behaviour as prostitutes and courtesans, wives and mothers, old maids and widows. Cindy McCreery's detailed exploration of this relatively neglected genre extends our knowledge of contemporary attitudes towards women and offers an important new dimension to our understanding of Georgian culture.

A highly original history of American portraiture that places the experiences of enslaved people at its center This timely and eloquent book tells a new history of American art: how enslaved people mobilized portraiture for acts of defiance. Revisiting the origins of portrait painting in the United States, Jennifer Van Horn reveals how mythologies of whiteness and of nation building erased the aesthetic production of enslaved Americans of African descent and obscured the portrait's importance as a site of resistance. Moving from the wharves of colonial Rhode Island to antebellum Louisiana plantations to South Carolina townhouses during the Civil War, the book illuminates how enslaved people's relationships with portraits also shaped the trajectory of African American art post-emancipation. Van Horn asserts that Black creativity, subjecthood, viewership, and iconoclasm constituted instances of everyday rebellion against systemic oppression. Portraits of Resistance is not only a significant intervention in the fields of American art and history but also an important contribution to the reexamination of racial constructs on which American culture was built.

Recent events have pushed artists to visualize ideas of closeness in a new light. Kinship, published on the occasion of the National Portrait Gallery's tenth "Portraiture Now" exhibition, features the work of eight leading contemporary artists who explore familial relationships through photography, painting, sculpture, and performance. Contemporary portraiture offers a way to consider the mutable yet enduring qualities of familial relationships and the internal and external forces that affect our bonds with others. For example, interpretations of distance - whether emotional, physical, or geographical - have recently become more fraught. By recognizing the transformations that occur in the genre of portraiture and the threads that today's portraits share, we can better understand the universality and specificity of kinship. List of artists: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Jess T. Dugan, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jessica Todd Harper, Thomas Holton, Sedrick Huckaby, Anna Tsouhlarakis

Ceramics are an unparalleled resource for women's lives in ancient Greece, since they show a huge number of female types and activities. Yet it can be difficult to interpret the meanings of these images, especially when they seem to conflict with literary sources. This much-needed study shows that it is vital to see the vases as archaeology as well as art, since context is the key to understanding which images can stand as evidence for the real lives of women, and which should be reassessed.
Sian Lewis considers the full range of female existence in classical Greece - childhood and old age, unfree and foreign status, and the ageless woman characteristic of Athenian red-figure painting.

Women - as warriors, workers, mothers, sensual women,even absent women - haunt 19th- and 20th-century Western painting: their representation is one of its most common subjects. Representing Women brings together Linda Nochlin's most important writings on the subject, as she considers work by Miller, Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Seurat, Cassatt and Kollwitz, among many others. In her riveting, partly autobiographical, extended introduction, Nochlin documents her own pioneering approach to art history; throughout the seven essays in this book, she argues for the honest virtues of an art history that rejects methodological assumptions, and for art historians who investigate the work before their eyes while focusing on its subject matter, informed by a sensitivity to its feminist spirit.

Brings together, for the first time, Lucian Freud's oil on copper paintings, including his lost portrait of Francis Bacon and two works that have never been reproduced before In the early 1950s, Lucian Freud produced several works in oil paint on copper, a technique favored by 17th-century artists such as Rembrandt and Frans Hals, but unusual for a 20th-century painter. Originally thought to be only a handful, Freud in fact painted more than a dozen copper works-all small-scale, enamel-smooth and astonishingly intense. Based on a decade of research, this book, for the first time, brings together all of Freud's "coppers," including two works that have never been reproduced before. Among these paintings is Freud's famous portrait of Francis Bacon, labeled by Nicholas Serota as "the most important portrait of the 20th century." The work was stolen in 1988-its whereabouts still unknown-but during research for the book a rare photograph was discovered that shows the work just minutes before the theft, and it is published here for the first time. Distributed for Less Publishing

Contents:
1. Naked truths about classical art: An introduction 2. 'Ways of seeing' women in antiquity: An introduction to feminism in classical archaeology and ancient art history 3. Female beauty and male violence in early Italian society 4. divesting the female breast of clothes in classical sculpture 5. When painters execute a murderess: the representation of clytemnestra on attic vases 6. Sappho in attic vase painting 7. Gender and sexuality in the Parthenon frieze 8. Naked and limbless: Learning about the feminine body in ancient Athens 9. Nursing mothers in classical art 10. Making a world of difference: Gender, Asymmetry, and the Greek nude 11. The only happy couple: Hermaphrodites and gender 12. Violent stages in two Pompeian houses: Imperial taste, aristocratic response and messages of male control 13. Epilogue: gender and desire

What does it mean to be nude? What does the nude do? In a series of constantly surprising reflections, Jean-Luc Nancy and Federico Ferrari encounter the nude as an opportunity for thinking in a way that is stripped bare of all received meanings and preconceived forms. In the course of engagements with twenty-six separate images, the authors show how the nudes produced by painters and photographers expose this bareness of thought and leave us naked on the verge of a sense that is always nascent, always fleeting, on the surface of the skin, on the surface of the image. While the nude is a symbol of truth in philosophy and art alike, what the nude definitively and uniquely reveals is unclear. In Being Nude: The Skin of Images, the authors argue that the nude is always presented as both vulnerable in its exposure and shy of conceptualization, giving a sense of the ultimate ineffability of the meaning of being. Although the nude represents the revealed nature of truth, nude figures hold a part of themselves back, keeping in reserve the reality of their history, parts of their present selves, and also their future possibilities for change, development, and demise. Skin is itself a type of clothing, and stripping away exterior layers of fabric does not necessarily lead to grasping the truth. In this way, the difference between being clothed and being nude is diminished. The images that inspire the authors to contemplate the nudity of being show many ways in which one can and cannot be nude, and many ways of being in relation to oneself and to others, clothed and unclothed.

Putting the "leather" in Leathernecks and the "Gee" in GI's, SQP is delighted to present a new wing in the vast Gallery Girls museum, this time showcasing the women of wartime! From the naughty nose-art girls of WW2 to the hell-bent hellions of modern combat, Bombshells! contains mega-tons of magnificent warrior maidens, with artists like Pelaez, Mitch Byrd, Pedro Cuevas, J.L. Czerniawski, and a mighty battalion of others! Oh, you'll stand at full attention even while seated, this band of sisters are so hot! Tennnnn HUT! Cover art by Dave Dunstan. 64 pages black and white plus color covers.

The man behind the paintings: the extraordinary life of J. M. W Turner, one of Britain's most admired, misunderstood and celebrated artists J. M. W. Turner is Britain's most famous landscape painter. Yet beyond his artistic achievements, little is known of the man himself and the events of his life: the tragic committal of his mother to a lunatic asylum, the personal sacrifices he made to effect his stratospheric rise, and the bizarre double life he chose to lead in the last years of his life. A near mythical figure in his own lifetime, Franny Moyle tells the story of the man who was considered visionary at best and ludicrous at worst. A resolute adventurer, he found new ways of revealing Britain to the British, astounding his audience with his invention and intelligence. Set against the backdrop of the finest homes in Britain, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, this is an astonishing portrait of one of the most important figures in Western art and a vivid evocation of Britain and Europe in flux.

Julia Kay's Portrait Party is an international collaborative project in which artists all over the world make portraits of each other and share them online. After years of exchanging portraits, tips and techniques within the group, in Portrait Revolution these artists are now sharing their art, their words, and their inspiration with everyone who is interested in or would like to get started with portraiture. Here you can find information on using different media, how to handle difficult portrait issues, and more. Portrait Revolution showcases 450 portraits by 200 artists, in a wide variety of media from oil painting to iPad art, watercolour to ballpoint, linocut to mosaic. There are a range of styles from realistic to abstract and interpretations by multiple artists of the same subject.

Apart from a handful of art historians no one has ever heard of the Brussels painter Hendrick De Clerck (1560-1630). Nevertheless, De Clerck was a contemporary of Peter Paul Rubens, the latter having gone down in history as an artistic trailblazer and painting powerhouse, while Hendrick De Clerck has quietly faded into oblivion. Yet the subtly coded, vibrantly coloured pictures that De Clerck painted for Archduke Albert of Austria and his wife Isabella are political propaganda of the highest order. In creating a mode of archducal representation that could help to gain an empire, the sky is quite literally the limit. De Clerck represents Isabella as wise Minerva, chaste Diana, the Virgin Mary. And that's nothing compared to her husband, for in De Clerck's paintings Albert is transformed into the sun god Apollo or even into Jesus Christ himself. Hendrick De Clerck's mastery of ingenious pictorial strategy made him a leading player in one of the most ambitious projects history has ever seen. For those who know how to read them, his paintings tell a story of power, political promises, and grandiose ambition. Most of all, they are supreme examples of image-building; for as the Archdukes were well aware, even as a monarch you're only as important as you make yourself.

Sketches and drawings are the foundations of great art, where thoughts and concepts first come to life as an image. In Sketching from the Imagination: Characters, fifty talented artists share their sketches, inspirations, and approaches to creating characters. This book is a visually stunning collection packed with useful tips and creative insights--an invaluable resource that will inspire artists of all abilities.

Hollywood honeys and classic movie monsters. Sci-Fi femmes and Hammer horror queens. Lady vampires and creatures that go "rub" in the night It's all part of the imagination and twisted joy Carlos Valenzuela brings to every one of his paintings. Bring your own popcorn