The Story of Trees takes the reader on a visual journey from some of the earliest known tree species on our planet to the latest fruit cultivars.

The chosen trees have all had a profound effect on the planet and humankind. Starting with the Ginkgo biloba, fossils of which date back 270 million years, we learn about how trees came to be integral to the development of our species and how specific trees have become important religious, political and cultural symbols.

With beautiful illustrations by Thibaud Herem and fascinating botanical facts and figures, this book will appeal to tree lovers from all over the world.

Scott Grimando is an artist of prodigious gifts and abilities. He brings to life mystical creatures of legend and star-spanning humans of the future with brilliant clarity. His intricate cover paintings have been featured on some of the most popular SF and fantasy books in print today. In his latest collection - The Art of the Mythical Woman, Scott showcases the paintings, sketches, and studies of the females in his compositions, and the tour is truly exquisite! Profiled in Heavy Metal, honored in Spectrum, and the subject of many successful one-man shows, Scott Grimando is unique in his approach to fantasy, blending photo-realistic images with things that simply do not exist - outside this artist's unparalleled imagination! Foreword by fellow fantasy art heavyweight Donato Giancola.

This is the first book to concentrate on Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals's highly innovative approach to male portraiture. Frans Hals is one of the greatest portrait painters of all time and, together with Rembrandt, is one of the most eminent seventeenth-century Dutch artists. Published to coincide with the Wallace Collection's exhibition of the same name, Frans Hals: The Male Portrait explores the artist's highly innovative approach to male portraiture, from the beginning of his career in the 1610s until the end of his life in 1666. Through pose, expression and virtuosic painterly technique, Hals revolutionised the male portrait into something entirely new and fresh, capturing and revealing his sitters' characters like no one else before him. This book includes the first in-depth study of Hals's great masterpiece, The Laughing Cavalier, from 1624. The extravagantly dressed young man, confidently posed with his left arm akimbo in the extreme foreground of the picture and seemingly penetrating into the viewer's space, has been charming audiences for over a century. Richly illustrated, Frans Hals: The Male Portrait situates The Laughing Cavalier within the artist's larger oeuvre and demonstrates how, at a relatively early point in his career, Hals was able to achieve this great masterpiece.

A look at the painting traditions of northwestern India in the eighteenth century, and what they reveal about the political and artistic changes of the era In the long eighteenth century, artists from Udaipur, a city of lakes in northwestern India, specialized in depicting the vivid sensory ambience of its historic palaces, reservoirs, temples, bazaars, and durbars. As Mughal imperial authority weakened by the late 1600s and the British colonial economy became paramount by the 1830s, new patrons and mobile professionals reshaped urban cultures and artistic genres across early modern India. The Place of Many Moods explores how Udaipur's artworks-monumental court paintings, royal portraits, Jain letter scrolls, devotional manuscripts, cartographic artifacts, and architectural drawings-represent the period's major aesthetic, intellectual, and political shifts. Dipti Khera shows that these immersive objects powerfully convey the bhava-the feel, emotion, and mood-of specific places, revealing visions of pleasure, plenitude, and praise. These memorialized moods confront the ways colonial histories have recounted Oriental decadence, shaping how a culture and time are perceived. Illuminating the close relationship between painting and poetry, and the ties among art, architecture, literature, politics, ecology, trade, and religion, Khera examines how Udaipur's painters aesthetically enticed audiences of courtly connoisseurs, itinerant monks, and mercantile collectives to forge bonds of belonging to real locales in the present and to long for idealized futures. Their pioneering pictures sought to stir such emotions as love, awe, abundance, and wonder, emphasizing the senses, spaces, and sociability essential to the efficacy of objects and expressions of territoriality. The Place of Many Moods uncovers an influential creative legacy of evocative beauty that raises broader questions about how emotions and artifacts operate in constituting history and subjectivity, politics and place.

This title offers an art model's take on taking it off. ""Live Nude Girl"" is a lively meditation on the profession of nude modeling - that 'spine-tingling combination of power and vulnerability, submission and dominance' - as it has been practiced in history and as it is practiced today. Kathleen Rooney draws on her own experiences working as an artist's model, as well as on the stories of famous, notorious, and mysterious artists and models through the ages. Combining personal perspective, historical anecdote, and witty prose, Rooney reveals that both the appeal of posing nude for artists and the appeal of drawing the naked figure lie in our deeply human responses to beauty, sex, love, and death.

A delightful journey through Pennsylvania Dutch Country. Explore the tourist-magnet town of Intercourse, PA, in full color This souvenir book will prove a nostaligic tour for all who have been there, and a motivational force to anyone else. Comes in two versions, this one with a cover that displays the area, the other with a novelty cover.

This richly illustrated publication explores the lasting influence of Gainsborough's Blue Boy on British art and culture Marking the return of Gainsborough's Blue Boy to the UK exactly 100 years since it left for the United States, this richly illustrated publication will explore the lasting influence of this iconic painting on British art and culture. During the nineteenth century, the painting's fame grew and full-length portraits by Gainsborough and his contemporaries became much sought after by wealthy American collectors. The sale of The Blue Boy to the American railroad magnate and collector Henry E. Huntington in 1921 was unsurprisingly viewed as a national tragedy-emblematic of a shift in economic and cultural power. However, its afterlife, as a permanent ambassador for British art, has undoubtedly fed into ideas of Britain and Britishness-its history, society, culture and character-that still resonate today. Including a select group of paintings that demonstrate the profound influence of Sir Anthony van Dyck and the old master tradition on Gainsborough's practice and identity, Gainsborough's Blue Boy will examine this masterpiece within the context of the National Gallery's collection. Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The National Gallery, London January 25-May 15, 2022

Flower fans and nature enthusiasts will fall in love with this charming art book from Instagram sensation Flora Forager featuring the best of her unique floral compositions created with botanical materials. Flora Forager creates images out of flower petals, leaves, stones, twigs, and other natural materials that she finds in her garden and in urban wild areas in her neighbourhood. This intimate, lovely book collects her best pieces, including 20% new, exclusive art, along with a peek into her unique creative process. Featured pieces include scenes, mandalas, animals, birds, fish, insects, mythical creatures, iconic women, old masters, and more. Each artwork is accompanied by explanatory text on a facing page including piece name, materials used, and a short, evocative description of the artist's process and inspiration.

Stefano Mazzotti and Vincenzo Silvestroni, that wild duo that put massive heat in the "Velvet Love" series, is back again with a new collection of blistering images and concepts! Tattoos are the subject - ink on girls to be more specific! A showcase of young ladies are illustrated, and then illustrated upon, each relating their own unique story as to the whys and where's (like which part of their most personal real estate is about to get a forever makeover!). Let's face it - tattoos are hot, and cute girls who want them are even hotter! The "Velvet Love" team is certainly up to the challenge of making all this happen - the resulting book is jaw-dropping perfection!

The Erotic Object: Sexuality in Sculpture From Prehistory to the Present

The power and eroticism of sculpture, form, volume and space are sensitively explored in this wide-ranging study, which takes in the history of sculpture from prehistoric times to contemporary art.

Featuring discussions of many famous sculptors, including: Michelangelo Buonarroti, Antonio Canova, Auguste Rodin, Eric Gill, Andy Goldsworthy, Jasper Johns, Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, Barbara Hepworth and Gianlorenzo Bernini.

Many contemporary artists are studied too, including installation and performance artists (Catherine Elwes, Karen Finley, Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann), and women sculptors such as Alice Aycock, Mary Miss, Rebecca Horn, Nancy Graves, Eva Hesse, Kathe Kollwitz and Judy Chicago.

Regardless of what sculpture depicts, it can be seen as erotic. The surfaces, materials and forms are sensuous: wood, stone, marble, granite, clay, bronze. Touching is pleasure. It is a pleasure that is, perhaps, pre-institutional, pre-industrial and pre-political.

Touching cuts through socialand cultural constructs, such asart, ideology, education and war, and goes back to aprimeval form of being. At same time, touching is a sense of the both personal and societal. John Keats said, 'touch hasa memory'. Sculpture activates this fundamental relation with things. Sculpture renews contact with the simple but utterly crucial experiences such as touch, sight, and smell.

Fully illustrated, with many rare and fascinating illustrations, including prints, paintings and buildings as well as sculptures and statues.

This book has been revised and updated. ISBN 9781861714092. 296 pages. www.crmoon.com

Over the course of his photography career, Daniel Kariko came to realise that many of his most stunning subjects could be found in his own home. Kariko utilises a combination of a Scanning Electron Microscope and optical Stereo Microscope to achieve a portrait-like effect for insects and arthropods. Vibrant in colour and surprising in personality, these images reveal such details as the glittering eyes of a horsefly, the strong legs of a centipede and the fetching smile of a honeybee. Each photograph comes with a full-body illustration from artist Isaac Talley and character descriptions from entomologist Tim Christensen. Blurring the lines of art and science, Aliens Among Us is a guidebook for anyone interested in putting a face to the creepy-crawlies under the couch.

Heaven's missing more than just one angel! We're counting over sixty that have gone AWOL, just to end up in this array! Angel Lust 2 flies into the sky and brings an all-new collection of heavenly guardians down to Earth for we merest of mortals to enjoy! These are the best sort of angels - the kind with a little devil in them, as seen by artists like Candia, Buci, Danilo, Flores, LeBlanc, Marachi, Sosa, and more. Say your prayers and have some breath mints ready!

This inspiring sketchbook is part of the new "20 Ways "series from Quarry Books, designed to offer artists, designers, and doodlers a fun and sophisticated collection of illustration fun. Each spread features 20 inspiring illustrated examples of 45 themes - tree, tulip, shell, owl, peacock feather, mushroom, cloud, and much, much more-over 900 drawings, with blank space for you to draw your take on "20 Ways to Draw a Tree."This is not a step-by-step technique book--rather, the stylized flowers, trees, leaves, and clouds are simplified, modernized, and reduced to the most basic elements, showing you how simple abstract shapes and forms meld to create the building blocks of any item that you want to draw. Each of the 20 interpretations provides a different, interesting approach to drawing a single item, providing loads of inspiration for your own drawing. Presented in the author's uniquely creative style, this engaging and motivational practice book provides a new take on the world of sketching, doodling, and designing.
Get out your favorite drawing tool, and remember, there are not just "20 Ways to Draw a Tree"

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.

This text is a collection of 50 watercolours commissioned & approved by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II & Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Painted by wildlife artist James Alder, the subjects are selected from their Majesties personal favourite birds & flowers.

Featuring over 100 sketches, Drawn to the Edge gives a visual tour of the Outer Hebrides, one of the most remote parts of Scotland. Lewis and Harris are known for their harsh and stunning landscapes, and Barber has captured these simply and beautifully.

Nature's Explorers celebrates the individuals who made great personal endeavours in order to document the natural world. Their findings revolutionised our understanding of nature and gave birth to the modern fields of geography, evolutionary biology, oceanography and anthropology. From ground-breaking theorists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to evocative artists like Ferdinand Bauer and John James Audubon, these explorers shared an ambition to illuminate new worlds and each embodied the spirit of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.

You can discover Japanese art like no other. Originally created by the artists of the ukiyo-e school of the floating world to advertise brothels in 17th-century Yoshiwara, these popular spring pictures (shunga) transcended class and gender in Japan for almost 300 years. These tender, humorous and brightly coloured pieces celebrate sexual pleasure in all its forms, culminating in the beautiful, yet graphic, work of iconic artists Utamaro, Hokusai and Kunisada. This catalogue of a major international exhibition aims to answer some key questions about what shunga is and why was it produced. Erotic Japanese art was heavily suppressed in Japan from the 1870s onwards as part of a process of cultural modernisation that imported many contemporary western moral values. Only in the last twenty years or so has it been possible to publish unexpurgated examples in Japan and this ground-breaking publication presents this fascinating art in its historical and cultural context for the first time. Within Japan, shunga has continued to influence modern forms of art, including manga, anime and Japanese tattoo art. Drawing on the latest scholarship and featuring over 400 images of works from major public and private collections, this landmark book sheds new light on this unique art form within Japanese social and cultural history. Shunga: sex and pleasure in Japanese art is published to accompany an exhibition at the British Museum from October 2013 to January 2014.

Discover how to draw true-to-life human figures and poses with detailed step-by-step instructions and tips and tricks on the best drawing techniques.

Grab your sketchbook, pens, and pencils and follow along as this instructional drawing guide teaches you everything you need to know about creating the most realistic human figures.

With more than 150 easy-to-follow illustrations, Drawing People is the perfect guide for aspiring artists looking to develop their people-drawing skills. Start off simple with learning how to draw basic body shapes. By the end, you will have gained the anatomical knowledge you need to make your human figures as realistic as possible including learning to draw:

• Specific muscle groups
• Artistic body poses
• Lifelike portraits and much more!

Whether you’re a beginner or a drawing pro, Drawing People is the perfect book for anyone looking to hone their technical drawing skills and take their illustrations to the next level.