Sunflowers, roses, succulents, ferns, wildflowers - this rich bouquet of postcards features one hundred botanical postcards from ten celebrated artists from around the world. The colorful cards, in our popular postcard box format, are ideal for correspondence or display. A booklet about the artists highlights their creative processes, influences, and favorite houseplants.

Highly illustrated, full colour book showcasing what is unique about the North Coast 500. Striking images and descriptive text of the best places to visit are shown along with a simple route map showing locations. 100 of the best places to stop on route including; * Beaches and bays; Sandwood Bay to Red Point Beach * Engineering and architecture; Caledonian Canal to Noss Head Lighthouse * Historic sites; Culloden battlefield to Dunrobin Castle * Off the beaten track; Cape Wrath to Traligill Caves * Urban areas: Ullapool to John o' Groats * Wildlife and nature: Dunnet Head to Suilven A book to help plan your trip around the dramatic North Scotland. An indication of how long to spend at each place is given along with full description and photograph.

Throughout history flowers have been an integral part of human survival and culture - as food, for medicine, to express feelings, as symbols, to commemorate and celebrate, and to decorate. Their shapes, colours, scents and textures have always attracted us, as they do animals and insects. Flowers are used as luxury spices (saffron), and as colouring and flavouring agents - marigolds fed to chickens make eggs more yellow and lavender was Elizabeth I's favourite flavour of jam. Flowers are full of symbolic meaning: violets represent modesty, daises purity and daffodils unrequited love. And they have always played an important role in culture through myths and legends, literature and the decorative arts. This delightful new book brings together 100 of the world's flowers to tell their remarkable stories. Each flower is richly illustrated in colour and accompanied by facts about each species and what role it has played in our culture and history.

It started in 1978 with an ordinary coffee shop near Kyoto. Word spread that the waitresses wore no panties under their miniskirts. Similar establishments popped up across the country. Men waited in line outside to pay three times the usual coffee price just to be served by a panty-free young woman. Within a few years, a new craze took hold: the no-panties "massage" parlor. Increasingly bizarre services followed, from fondling clients through holes in coffins to commuter-train fetishists. One particularly popular destination was a Tokyo club called "Lucky Hole" where clients stood on one side of a plywood partition, a hostess on the other. In between them was a hole big enough for a certain part of the male anatomy. Taking the Lucky Hole as his title, Nobuyoshi Araki captures Japan's sex industry in full flower, documenting in more than 800 photos the pleasure-seekers and providers of Tokyo's Shinjuku neighborhood before the February 1985 New Amusement Business Control and Improvement Act put a stop to many of the country's sex locales. Through mirrored walls, bed sheets, the bondage and the orgies, this is the last word on an age of bacchanalia, infused with moments of humor, precise poetry, and questioning interjections. About the series Bibliotheca Universalis - Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe!

Unleash the creative power of Procreate to bring outdoor scenes to life on your iPad, from thumbnail designs to final images. In this book for newcomers to the software as well as more accomplished users, several renowned and experienced designers demonstrate plein air painting, sharing not only their professional tips and tricks, but also how the traditional painting process translates to Procreate. You will become fluent in using Procreate for all stages of outdoor painting - capturing the spirit and essence of a landscape, subject, or building by incorporating natural light, color, and movement into your works. The thorough Getting Started section spotlights the specific Procreate tools, such as Brushes, Layers, and Adjustments, that bring your paintings to life. Perfecting color and nuance of sky, land, and human subjects outdoors is vital, and the Quick Tips section lets you quickly locate and manipulate the tools you need. Take the opportunity to observe and practice the techniques as part of a real-world workflow, as professional artists demonstrate in seven step-by-step Projects how to use Procreate's tools to successfully evolve a plein-air painting from initial idea to final masterpiece. Whether or not you have used Procreate before, Beginner's Guide to Procreate: Plein Air ensures your passion for outdoor painting can be fully realized on the iPad screen.

Bodies mangled, limbs broken, skin flayed, blood spilled: from paintings to prints to small sculptures, the art of the late Middle Ages and early modern period gave rise to disturbing scenes of violence. Many of these torture scenes recall Christ's Passion and its aftermath, but the martyrdoms of saints, stories of justice visited on the wicked, and broadsheet reports of the atrocities of war provided fertile ground for scenes of the body's desecration. Contributors to this volume interpret pain, suffering, and the desecration of the human form not simply as the passing fancies of a cadre of proto-sadists, but also as serving larger social functions within European society. Taking advantage of the frameworks established by scholars such as Samuel Edgerton, Mitchell Merback, and Elaine Scarry (to name but a few), Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300-1650 provides an intriguing set of lenses through which to view such imagery and locate it within its wider social, political, and devotional contexts. Though the art works discussed are centuries old, the topics of the essays resonate today as twenty-first-century Western society is still absorbed in thorny debates about the ethics and consequences of the use of force, coercion (including torture), and execution, and about whether it is ever fully acceptable to write social norms on the bodies of those who will not conform.

From the time of the pharaohs to world-famous internet sensations, cats have inspired artists to strive to capture their lithe movements and cryptic personalities for as long as they've been our furry companions. This joyous collection celebrates cats in art, spanning eras, styles and continents, from the brushes of masters such as Manet, Gauguin, Klee, Hokusai, Renoir and more.

"This beautifully produced book will be inspiring to botanical artists and all those who are captivated by the orchid." -Leisure Painter Orchids have long held a place of esteem and fascination in the horticultural world. In the 19th century, orchid collecting reached new fanatical heights, with explorers dispatched to every corner of the globe in search of new varieties that could be auctioned at extravagant prices, and orchids are still one of the most popular flowers to breed and buy to this day. These beautiful, diverse flowers are one of the two largest families of flowering plants, with over 30,000 species and over 181,500 hybrids and cultivars. The RHS Orchid Committee have commissioned watercolours of over 7,000 award-winning hybrids that demonstrate particular value in their fabulous array of colours, patterns, sizes and shapes. Through these paintings, stories of high stakes orchid breeding and exhibiting are explored, with a cast of characters who helped shape the horticultural world we know today, alongside the dedicated artists who still support their endeavours.

Learn how to paint birds in watercolour without even trying! Using a simple ten-step process, learn how to draw a basic outline starting with simple shapes, then add washes of colour and fine details to complete your work. Arranged in three chapters based on skill level, this book features 25 lovely projects, each showing you how to paint a bird in ten steps. There are paint swatches for every bird, showing you the colours you need to mix for each step and the finished painting serves as a reference to guide you. It couldn't be easier! Also included is a useful techniques section at the beginning, and clever painting tips from the author throughout the book. With birds as diverse as an Atlantic puffin, a barn owl, a hummingbird and a bald eagle, there is plenty to choose from and practise with, to develop your skills.

Centered on the early Cambodian masterpiece Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan in the Cleveland Museum of Art, seven essays present new research and discoveries regarding its history, material, and context. Introducing the Cleveland Krishna as one of eight monumental sculptures of Hindu deities from the sacred mountain of Phnom Da, the museum's curator presents evidence for its establishment in a cave sanctuary and recounts its fascinating journey from there to Cleveland in multiple pieces--including a decades-long detour of being buried in a garden in Belgium. Conservators and scientists elucidate the long-fraught process of identifying the sculptural fragments that belong to the Cleveland Krishna and explain the new reconstructions unveiled in the 2021 exhibition Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia's Sacred Mountain.An international team of specialists in the history of art, archaeology, and anthropology place the Cleveland Krishna amid the material traces of a sophisticated population based in the Mekong River delta at the ancient metropolis known as Angkor Borei. They reveal the long-lasting influence and prestige of the site, well into the Angkorian period, more than six hundred years after the creation of the Cleveland Krishna and the gods of Phnom Da. This is the fifth in the Cleveland Masterworks Series.

In 1953 Marlon Brando donned a black leather Perfecto motorcycle jacket, military cap, denim jeans, and engineer boots to portray Johnny, sneering leader of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, in The Wild One. In 1954 Tom of Finland abandoned brown leather in his artwork to create his own wild ones: muscular, hyper-masculine, black leather-clad rebels with powerful engines between their legs. The look was adopted by the Satyrs Motorcycle Club, the first gay outlaw club, that same year, making Tom's fantasy world reality. Of course, being Tom, he soon customized his new gay icons, adding leather jodhpurs, knee high boots and leather caps, and every motorcycle bore the brand name "Tom" on the gas tank. Tom's bikers first appeared as two "Motorcycle Boys" in Physique Pictorial, Winter 1958. Another made the cover of the April 1960 issue. Bikers dominated his PP content from then on, as a nod to its American readership as much as his growing obsession. When he sought an ongoing character, a personal avatar, in 1968, he created Kake as the ultimate biker leatherman, and elaborated on his riding adventures - of every kind - through 26-panel stories. Tom adopted Kake's gear as his own, presenting in black leather jacket, white t-shirt, jeans, and high boots to the end of his life. The Little Book of Tom: Bikers includes Tom's earliest images for Physique Pictorial, Kake in motorcycle gear, biker panel stories, and sizzling single drawings, all packed into 192 pages of sexy, masculine men enjoying other masculine men in black leather, blue jeans, and high black boots. On bikes.

The definitive, comprehensive guide to botanical painting, covering basic botany, plant groups and a scientific approach to the subject. Drawing on her experience as a botanical art teacher, Christina Brodie takes you on a holistic approach to botanical art and expertly covers botanical terminology, drawing and painting techniques in a wide range of media, dissection and examination of plants, fieldwork studies, microscope work and tips on presentation. Through step-by-step projects and with clearly explained techniques, learn to draw and paint flowers, fruit, leaves, stems and roots, trees, fungi, ferns and horsetails, seaweeds and other algae, mosses and lichens with remarkable precision and stunning detail.

A richly illustrated celebration of the paintings of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama From the moment of their unveiling at the National Portrait Gallery in early 2018, the portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama have become two of the most beloved artworks of our time. Kehinde Wiley's portrait of President Obama and Amy Sherald's portrait of the former first lady have inspired unprecedented responses from the public, and attendance at the museum has more than doubled as visitors travel from near and far to view these larger-than-life paintings. After witnessing a woman drop to her knees in prayer before the portrait of Barack Obama, one guard said, "No other painting gets the same kind of reactions. Ever." The Obama Portraits is the first book about the making, meaning, and significance of these remarkable artworks. Richly illustrated with images of the portraits, exclusive pictures of the Obamas with the artists during their sittings, and photos of the historic unveiling ceremony by former White House photographer Pete Souza, this book offers insight into what these paintings can tell us about the history of portraiture and American culture. The volume also features a transcript of the unveiling ceremony, which includes moving remarks by the Obamas and the artists. A reversible dust jacket allows readers to choose which portrait to display on the front cover. An inspiring history of the creation and impact of the Obama portraits, this fascinating book speaks to the power of art-especially portraiture-to bring people together and promote cultural change. Published in association with the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC

Learn how to play mah-jong with this beautifully illustrated mah-jong set! Animal Mah-jong takes the traditional Chinese tile game and updates it for a new audience in this affordable card format. Rather than the traditional line drawings of bamboo and Chinese characters, it features Ryuto Miyake's beautiful animal illustrations - each suit features Asian animals from the land, sea and air. Get ready to pong, chow and kong like you never have before! Stunning illustrations by Ryuto Miyake Affordable new card format Screen-free fun - a high quality non-digital game for all ages Suitable for children and familes to play together

Decades' worth of images have been distilled down to 512 pages of photographs in this ultimate retrospective collection of Nobuyoshi Araki's work, selected by the artist himself. First published as a Limited Edition and now back in a new format to celebrate TASCHEN's 40th anniversary, the curation delves deep into Araki's best-known imagery: Tokyo street scenes; faces and foods; colorful, sensual flowers; female genitalia; and the Japanese art of kinbaku, or bondage. As girls lay bound but defiant and glistening petals assume suggestive shapes, Araki plays constantly with patterns of subjugation and emancipation, death and desire and with the slippage between serene image and shock. Describing his bondage photographs as "a collaboration between the subject and the photographer", Araki seeks to come closer to his female subjects through photography, emphasizing the role of spoken conversation between himself and the model. In his native Japan, he has attained cult status for many women who feel liberated by his readiness to photograph the expression of their desire. About the series TASCHEN is 40! Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible publishing, helping bookworms around the world curate their own library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia at an unbeatable price. Today we celebrate 40 years of incredible books by staying true to our company credo. The 40 series presents new editions of some of the stars of our program-now more compact, friendly in price, and still realized with the same commitment to impeccable production.

A timely new edition featuring the brilliant work from among the most inventive minds in illustration and cartoon wizardry. Heath Robinson was one of Britain's most successful graphic artists. His work has had a huge influence on comic art in this country, but also on the image and self-image of the British. As the champion of pragmatic man, Heath Robinson presented a vision of the British as an unflappable, ingenious and slightly demented breed of inventors that persists to the present day. The British are still a nation of garage-haunting amateur engineers who will recognise the inhabitants of Heath Robinson's world, with their pot bellies and pots of tea, archaic faces and sturdily commonsensical approach to the problems of existence. How to hunt tigers by elephant, how to get an even tan, rise with the sun or put out a chimney fire, these and many more pressing questions are answered in the pages of Contraptions. With illustrations salvaged from the family archives and commentary by Heath Robinson expert, Geoffrey Beare, Contraptions is the best possible introduction to the work of one of Britain's great comic talents.

At the turn of the fifteenth century, private devotionals became a speciality of the renowned Ghent-Bruges illuminators. Wealthy patrons who commissioned work from these artists often spared no expense in the presentation of their personal prayer books, or 'books of hours', from detailed decoration to luxurious bindings and embroidery. This enchanting illuminated manuscript was painted by the Master of the David Scenes in the Grimani Breviary (known as the David Master), one of the renowned Flemish illuminators in the sixteenth century. Every page of the manuscript is exquisitely decorated. Fine architectural interiors, gorgeous landscapes and detailed city scenes, each one depicting a narrative, form the subjects of three full-size illuminations and forty-two full-page miniatures. There are floral borders on a gold ground or historiated borders in the Flemish and Italian style on every page. It is one of the finest examples of medieval illumination in a personal prayer book and the most copiously illustrated work of the David Master to survive. The manuscript owes its name to the French Queen, Marie de Medici, widow of King Henri IV. For a time she went into exile in Brussels, where she is thought to have acquired the manuscript before moving again to Cologne. An inscription in English states that she left the book of hours in this city, and it is here that an English manuscript collector, Francis Douce, may have acquired the book and eventually donated it to the Bodleian Library. Together with a scholarly introduction that gives an overview of Flemish illumination and examines each of the illustrations in detail, this full-colour facsimile limited edition, bound in linen with a leather quarter binding and beautifully presented in a slipcase, faithfully reproduces all 176 leaves of the original manuscript.

This book traces the history of the Annunciation, exploring the deep and lasting impact of the event on the Western imagination. Waller explores the Annunciation from its appearance in Luke's Gospel, to its rise to prominence in religious doctrine and popular culture, and its gradual decline in importance during the Enlightenment.

With over 70 original illustrations, printmaker Angela Harding invites you to look at how the light changes the world around us, and how that changes us in its turn. "I, like many other people, find great inspiration in the way mornings, evenings or bright midday light changes the way we see the things around us. The bouncing light of a cloud-filled storm sky can change a seascape through a palette of blues, greys, and turquoises. The cool summer moonlight that crosses my back garden sends long shadows that change the mood of the garden from homely to unfamiliar. And whether it's the low light of an English February afternoon or the sharp, bright mid-morning light of the Cornish seaside, the light and dark we experience affects our moods. "But life is busy, and I am guilty as anyone of being too preoccupied by daily life to just stop and look. This book is a collection of illustrations from those moments when I have stopped and looked; when a particular encounter with nature has been highlighted by the time of day or the time of night, becoming a strong image long remembered and one that I wish to illustrate. "I hope you enjoy this journey through 24 hours of my collected memories of the nature that surrounds me."

How and why did a medieval female saint from the Eastern Mediterranean come to be such a powerful symbol in early modern Rome? This study provides an overview of the development of the cult of Catherine of Alexandria in Renaissance Rome, exploring in particular how a saint's cult could be variously imaged and 'reinvented' to suit different eras and patronal interests. Cynthia Stollhans traces the evolution of the saint's imagery through the lens of patrons and their interests-with special focus on the importance of Catherine's image in the fashioning of her Roman identity-to show how her imagery served the religious, political, and/or social agendas of individual patrons and religious orders.

Despite the large number of monumental Last Supper frescoes which adorn refectories in Quattrocento Florence, until now no monograph has appeared in English on the Florentine Last Supper frescoes, nor has any study examined the perceptions of the original viewers. This study examines the rarely considered effect of gender on the profoundly contextualized perceptions of the male and female religious who viewed the Florentine Last Supper images in surprisingly different physical and cultural refectory environments. In addition to offering detailed visual analyses, the author draws on a broad spectrum of published and unpublished primary materials, including monastic rules, devotional tracts and reading materials, the constitutions and ordinazioni for individual houses, inventories from male and female communities and the Convent Suppression documents of the Archivio di Stato in Florence. By examining the original viewers' attitudes to images, their educational status, acculturated pieties, affective responses, levels of community, degrees of reclusion, and even the types of food eaten in the refectories, Hiller argues that the perceptions of these viewers of the Last Supper frescoes were intrinsically gendered.

Dedicated to the topics of eroticism and sexuality in the visual production of the medieval and early modern Muslim world, this volume sheds light on the diverse socio-cultural milieus of erotic images, on the range of motivations that determined their production, and on the responses generated by their circulation. The articles revise what has been accepted as a truism in existing literature-that erotic motifs in the Islamic visual arts should be read metaphorically-offering, as an alternative, rigorous contextual and cultural analyses. Among the subjects discussed are male and female figures as sexualized objects; the spiritual dimensions of eroticism; licit versus illicit sexual practices; and the exotic and erotic 'others' as a source of sensual delight. As the first systematic study on these themes in the field of Islamic art history, this volume fills a considerable gap and contributes to the lively debates on the nature and function of erotic and sexual images that have featured prominently in broader art-historical discussions in recent decades.

Based on a thorough examination of buildings, inscriptions, archival documents and hagiographies, this book uncovers the political significance of Bektashi shrines in the Ottoman imperial age. It thus provides a fresh and comprehensive account of the formative process of the Bektashi order, which started out as a network of social groups that took issue with Ottoman imperial policies in the late fifteenth century, was endorsed imperially as part of Bayezid II's (r. 1481-1512) soft power policy, and was kept in check by imperial authorities as the Ottoman approach to the Safavid conflict hardened during the rest of the sixteenth century. This book demonstrates that it was a combination of two collective activities that established the primary parameters of Bektashi culture from the late fifteenth century onwards. One was the writing of Bektashi hagiographies; they linked hitherto distinct social groups (such as wandering dervishes and warriors) with each other through the lives of historical figures who were their patron saints, idols and identity markers (such as the saint HacAE+/- BektaAY and the martyr Seyyid Gazi), while incorporating them into Ottoman history in creative ways. The other one was the architectural remodelling of the saints' shrines. In terms of style, imagery and content, this interrelated literary and architectural output reveals a complicated process of negotiation with the imperial order and its cultural paradigms. Examined in more detail in the book are the shrines of Seyyid Gazi and HacAE+/- BektaAY and associated legends and hagiographies. Though established as independent institutions in medieval Anatolia, they were joined in the emerging Bektashi network under the Ottomans, became its principal centres and underwent radical architectural transformation, mainly under the patronage of raider commanders based in the Balkans. In the process, they thus came to occupy an intermediary socio-political zone between the Ottoman empire and its contestants in the sixteenth century.