Sold in packs of 6. Gorgeous, foiled, handmade greeting cards, blank inside and shrink-wrapped with a gold envelope. Themed with our art calendars, foiled notebooks and illustrated art books. Our greeting cards are printed on FSC paper and wrapped in biodegradable cellobag, and are themed with our art calendars, foiled notebooks and illustrated art books. Aimee Stewart is a self-taught artist who is strongly influenced by music and literature. Her special focus is in eclectic digital painting and photomanipulation. She describes herself as a champion of daydreams; she loses thoughts of reality and becomes immersed in fantasy creations.

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Notebooks. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed, then foil stamped. And they're powerfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example features Nel Whatmore's Beautiful Reflections. Nel Whatmore is a fine artist, well known for her floral paintings and abstracts. A contemporary colourist, her paintings are both expressionist and evocative. She seeks to constantly explore mediums and their ability to convey emotion. Her work is varied and encapsulates her interest in expressionist painting.

This is the definitive instructional guide to the art of botanical illustration, published in association with The Society of Botanical Artists and featuring detailed step-by-step demonstrations by members of the Society. Botanical illustration has been a popular art form for many centuries, with its appealing traditions of detail and beauty. This beautifully illustrated book covers all aspects of the subject and is an essential book for all serious students of botanical painting. The book includes useful information about materials, basic plant anatomy, flower and leaf shapes, and then explores the techniques for drawing and coloured pencil work, as well as painting with watercolour and gouache. Subjects include exotic and common plants, flowers, fruit and vegetables, as well as flowers in the garden. Packed with step-by-step demonstrations and stunning illustrations, this is an inspiring, practical guide, as well as a visual treat.

Published to accompany Piano Nobile's exhibition of the same title, Cyril Mann: The Solid Shadow Paintings, is the first book to describe this vivid and art historically significant group of still-life paintings. As well as including a fully-illustrated catalogue of the exhibition, the book describes how Mann's solid shadow style emerged in the early nineteen-fifties. Though Mann spent the rest of his career painting natural light, the solid shadow paintings were made under the glow of an electric lightbulb. After moving into a lightless flat at Old Street, Mann's pictures began to course with unnatural, electric colour. For the first time, he noticed the line that joins together an object with the shadow it casts. He depicted this line in his paintings as if it were itself a solid object, laid on the table before him beside apples and Pelican paperbacks. Undertaken between 1951 and 1957, Mann's solid shadow paintings were a dazzling interjection in the subdued art world of fifties Britain. This was his most original period and it stands as his lasting contribution to the history of twentieth-century painting. These works have never been displayed together before and the accompanying exhibition to this catalogue will provide an insight into the artist's radiant formal language.

Bob Jones Jr. founded the collection as an educational effort and opened it on the campus of the university named after his father in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1951. Those first 25 paintings included works by Bicci di Lorenzo, Luca Giordano, El Greco, and Tintoretto, and today the collection comprises over 400 paintings, as well as a wide range of sculpture, decorative arts, and antiquities. It is widely recognized among scholars as one of the finest collections of Renaissance and Baroque paintings in America, and a document of the revival of the taste for Baroque pictures in the mid-20th century. Erin Jones’s introduction provides an overview of the history of the various iterations of the Museum & Gallery, even as it looks forward to a new home in the centre of its community. Richard P. Townsend’s essay presents the most in-depth examination to date of Bob Jones Jr. as a collector, extensively using letters, invoices, and photographs to paint a picture of Jones hitherto not available. At the heart of the volume is the presentation of 55 paintings, featuring works by great European masters including Botticelli, Bouts, Cranach, Guercino, Jordaens, Preti, Reni, Ribera, Rubens, Tiepolo, and Zurbarán.

Indian art, increasingly popular in the west, cannot be fully appreciated without some knowledge of the religious and philosophical background. This book, first published in 1985, covers all aspects of Hindu iconography, and explains that its roots lie far back in the style of prehistoric art. The dictionary demonstrates the rich profusion of cults, divinities, symbols, sects and philosophical views encompassed by the Hindu religious tradition.

Simply magical manga in watercolor! Learn how to create beautiful manga art from pencil sketch to finished painting, with this comprehensive guide. As the popularity of Manga art continues to soar, manga and comic book artist Lisa Santrau shows beginners how to create subtle and beautiful manga pictures using pencil and watercolors - the simplest of art materials. Lisa explains the materials and tools needed and then explores the fundamentals of how to draw manga - from color theory and breaking down drawings into basic shapes, to body proportions and faces for both classic manga and chibi manga figures. You will learn how to sketch, how to create depth in your work with shading, and a range of watercolor techniques including washes, wet-on-wet and layering, as well as special techniques involving masking fluid and an innovative 'film' technique for creating texture and patterns. The exercises that follow the basics explore a wide range of techniques including manga poses, hair and eyes, then learn about backgrounds, textures, gradients and more. Finally, there are 12 step-by-step painting projects to perfect your manga art skills, with downloadable templates if you want to skip the drawing and get straight to the painting. The projects are varied and fun, and comprise: Sweet chibi girl on a slice of cake, using the dry technique Steampunk chibis against a bright background, using the wet-on-wet technique Chibi sorcerer's apprentice in a flying teacup, with a galaxy background Chibi Harry, aka a world-famous wizard, teaching you character design Young girl framed by a romantic floral design, using a monochrome palette Sailor boy in a symbolic sun circle, created with masking fluid Girl in a kimono backlit by a window with flowers, using the white of the paper Historical heroine in a voluminous ballgown, using the film technique Melancholic schoolgirl against a fluorescent background, with the film technique Silhouette in the evening sunset, using the wet-on-wet technique Food overload boy in the land of plenty, featuring surface textures Girl's face with expressive eyes, exploring cool versus warm colors This easy-to-follow book by the creator of the popular Mechanical Princess comics, contains all you need to successfully paint your own watercolor manga art.

The sixteen studies in this book include six specially translated from Greek and another two published here for the first time. They deal with the art of painting in Crete at a time when the island was under Venetian rule. The main emphasis is on the 15th century and especially on the painter Angelos. More than thirty icons with his signature survive, and at least twenty more can be reliably attributed to him. Angelos was the most significant artist of a particularly significant era. It was at this time that the centre of artistic production migrated from Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire to Candia, the capital of Venetian-occupied Crete. These studies try to reconstruct the personality of this late Byzantine painter, Angelos, not only through his icons but also through his will (1436), now in the State Archives in Venice. In this context they also explore the status of the Cretan painter in society. The large number of extant Cretan icons clearly indicates the striking increase in production from the 15th century onwards. Similarly, archival documents are used to examine the trade of icons in Crete and the way Cretan artists had to organize their workshops in order to meet the requirements of the market.

Lucian Freud (1922-2011) was interested in the telling of truths. Always operating outside the main currents of 20th-century art, the esteemed portrait painter observed his subjects with the regimen and precision of a laboratory scientist. He recorded not only the blotches, bruises, and swellings of the living body, but also, beneath the flaws and folds of flesh, the microscopic details of what lies within: the sensation, the emotion, the intelligence, the bloom, and the inevitable, unstoppable decay. Despite rejecting parallels between him and his renowned grandfather, the correlation between Lucian Freud's sitting process for portraiture and Sigmund Freud's psychotherapy sessions is a fascinating element to this figurative oeuvre. Despite the thickness of the impasto surfaces, Freud's portraits of subjects as varied as the Queen, Kate Moss, and an obese job center supervisor penetrate the physicality of the body with a direct and often disarming insight. The result is as much a psychological interrogation as it is an uneasy examination of the relationship between artist and model. This book brings together some of Freud's most outstanding and unapologetic portraits, to introduce an artist widely considered one of the finest masters of the human form. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

First published in 1977. The purpose of this study is to locate the sources for the American style of painting characterised by measure and design - the representation of the specific and familiar according to principles of pictorial order. The reader shall see that there were a variety of conventions available to the artist and that his selection of one or another of them depended upon pragmatic, philosophical, and aesthetic considerations.

This book, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, explores and celebrates Turner's lifelong fascination with the sea. It also sets his work within the context of marine painting in the 19th century. Each chapter has an introductory text followed by discussion of specific paintings. Four of the chapters conclude with a feature essay on a specific topic.

Stimulating, informative guide by noted teacher covers painting technique, painting from life, materials (paints, varnishes, oils and mediums, grounds, etc.), a painter's training, more. Expert analysis of work of Velasquez, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Hals, Rembrandt, etc. 64 photos. 5 line drawings.

Originally published in 1998, The Handbook of Modern British Painting and Printmaking 1900-1990 has been designed for people who enjoy, study and buy British art. The only portable dictionary-style guide to the life and work of modern British painters and printmakers, the book provides information on some 2,000 artists, as well as entries on schools of art, on museums, galleries and collections, on societies and groups, and critics and patrons who have influenced the development of modern art in Britain. Compiled by scholars, the entries are cross-referenced and each concise biographical outline provides the relevant facts about the artist's life, a brief characterisation of the artist's work, and major bibliographic references. Wherever possible, one or two suggestions for further reading are cited.

This book focuses on the earliest surviving Christian icons, dated to the sixth and seventh centuries, which bear many resemblances to three other well-established genres of 'sacred portrait' also produced during late antiquity, namely Roman imperial portraiture, Graeco-Egyptian funerary portraiture and panel paintings depicting non-Christian deities. Andrew Paterson addresses two fundamental questions about devotional portraiture - both Christian and non-Christian - in the late antique period. Firstly, how did artists visualise and construct these images of divine or sanctified figures? And secondly, how did their intended viewers look at, respond to, and even interact with these images? Paterson argues that a key factor of many of these portrait images is the emphasis given to the depicted gaze, which invites an intensified form of personal encounter with the portrait's subject. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, theology, religion and classical studies.

Many well-known male writers produced fictions about colonial spaces and discussed the advantages of realism over romance, and vice versa, in the 'art of fiction' debate of the 1880s; but how did female writers contribute to colonial fiction? This volume links fictional, non-fictional and pictorial representations of a colonial otherness with the late nineteenth-century artistic concerns about representational conventions and possibilities. The author explores these texts and images through the postcolonial framework of 'exoticism', arguing that the epistemological dilemma of a 'self' encountering an 'other' results in the interrelated predicament to find poetic modalities - mimetic, realistic and documentary on the one hand; romantic, fantastic and picturesque on the other - that befit an 'exotic' representation. Thus women writers did not only participate in the making of colonial fictions but also in the late nineteenth-century artistic debate about the nature of fiction. This book maps the epistemological concerns of exoticism and of difference - self and other, home and away, familiarity and strangeness - onto the representational modes of realism and romance. The author focuses exclusively on female novelists, travel writers and painters of the turn-of-the-century exotic, and especially on neglected authors of academically under-researched genres such as the bestselling novel and the travelogue.

Master all the aspects of watercolour painting with this comprehensive practical manual. An introduction details all the equipment you will need and lays out the basic techniques, including the different strokes required, and how to mix the paints to create the right palette. There are then over 25 step-by-step projects to help you to put the basics into practice. There are projects to challenge beginners, and others for intermediate painters, all grouped by subject, including skies, water, landscapes, trees, flowers, buildings, animals and people. This accessible book has something for water-colourists of all abilities to learn from and help achieve their potential.

The Story of the America's Cup 1851-2021 tells the chronological history of 150 years of the most exciting and exhilarating yacht race, open the pages and you can almost feel the wind in the sails and the salt spray. Full page colour illustrations bring the yachts alive, set as they are in their natural element, at sea, on the waves; detailed descriptions give an amazing insider's view of the construction of individual boats, the routes sailed, the crews, the highs and lows of what was undoubtedly, extremely tough and competitive sailing, the victories and the defeats. Paintings by Tim Thompson, a leading marine artist are an integral part of the book's appeal; he has captured the pure essence, the spirit of the race and its place in history.

This book reinterprets Wifredo Lam's work with particular attention to its political implications, focusing on how these implications emerge from the artist's critical engagement with 20th-century anthropology. Field work conducted in Cuba, including the witnessing of actual Afro-Cuban religious ritual ceremonies and information collected from informants, enhances the interpretive background against which we can construe the meanings of Lam's art. In the process, Claude Cernuschi argues that Lam hoped to fashion a new hybrid style to foster pride and dignity in the Afro-Cuban community, as well as counteract the acute racism of Cuban culture.

One of the greatest biographies of an artist ever written, and a key document of the Renaissance. Written by a friend, fellow painter and fellow Florentine. Michelangelo Buonarrotti (1475-1564) is perhaps the greatest artist in the entire Western tradition. In painting, sculpture and architecture he created works that went beyond anything imagined before. The David - miraculously created, as Vasari describes, out of a piece of marble botched by another sculptor - the Sistine Ceiling, the Sistine Last Judgement, before which the Pope knelt in terrified prayer when it was first unveiled: these works have lost none of their awe-inspiring power. Michelangelo's impact was immediate, and he achieved a level of fame and influence that was unprecedented. It is not surprising, therefore, that the painter Giorgio Vasari should have made him the culmination of his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, the first true work of art history. Vasari was a close colleague as well as a fellow-artist and fellow- Florentine. The biography printed here, from Vasari's much improved second edition, draws a picture of Michelangelo the man and the artist that has an immediacy and an authority that have not been surpassed. The introduction by David Hemsoll situates this great work in the context of 16th century Italian art.

This book draws a comparison between two of the most prominent Jewish artists in the twentieth-century: Polish-born magician story-teller Isaac Bashevis-Singer (1904-1991) and Russian-born creator of visual magic Marc Chagall (1887-1985). In addition to their East European Jewish background both were exposed to Western culture. Chagall absorbed such turn-of-the-century avant-garde styles as Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Abstract Art, Surrealism; from these he created a unique blend, to which he brought the various Russian influences he had absorbed and his own special highly imaginative and inventive personal style. Bashevis-Singer brought to his works philosophical, psychological, scientific, medical and legal knowledge. While both artists were affected by these Western influences, they remained firmly entrenched within the Jewish culture - the Yiddish language and life in the "shtetl" - from which they drew their inspiration. Their world consisted of a special blend of reality and dream, realism and fantasy. Ruth Dorot demonstrates that they shared, albeit unwittingly, a common "meta-realistic" style combining the earthly with the supernatural and the transcendental. Their works allude to real place names, dates, facts and historical events; but at the same time contain occult forces, angels, demons, mysticism and mystery. Comparisons range over the Jewish "shtetl", Jewish artists, Love and Despair, the Holocaust and war, religion and mysticism. In the works of both artists, hope springs eternal; it is a hope emanating from the mystical realm of life as it relates to the magic of creation and the cosmic logic of the Creator. Artist and story-teller sail between hard-core reality and the yearning for redemption, between Judaism and universal values, between exile and revelation.

The Phillips Collection, America's first museum of modern art, was founded in 1921 by Duncan Phillips (1886-1966), a Washington DC collector who played a vital role in introducing America to contemporary art. Unusually for his time, Phillips saw American artists as fully equal to their European counterparts, often hanging their works side by side. Moreover, Phillips chose to buy and exhibit works according to stylistic continuities and affinities, reflecting the visual connections between various artistic expressions, past and present. Master Paintings from The Phillips Collection highlights 108 masterworks from the Phillips's permanent collection and offers insight into the creation of one of the greatest private collections of modern art in the world. Featuring works by both American and European artists, among them Degas, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Bonnard, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Klee, Homer, Whistler, Hopper, Stieglitz, O'Keeffe, Calder, and Rothko, it aims to re-create what Duncan Phillips considered the "life-enhancing" experience of seeing new or challenging art in an intimate setting.

Antebellum American Pendant Paintings: New Ways of Looking marks the first sustained study of pendant paintings: discrete images designed as a pair. It opens with a broad overview that anchors the form in the medieval diptych, religious history, and aesthetic theory and explores its cultural and historical resonance in the 19th-century United States. Three case studies examine how antebellum American artists used the pendant format in ways revelatory of their historical moment and the aesthetic and cultural developments in which they partook. The case studies on John Quidor's Rip Van Winkle and His Companions at the Inn Door of Nicholas Vedder (1839) and The Return of Rip Van Winkle (1849) and Thomas Cole's Departure and Return (1837) shed new light on canonical antebellum American artists and their practices. The chapter on Titian Ramsay Peale's Kilauea by Day and Kilauea by Night (1842) presents new material that pushes the geographical boundaries of American art studies toward the Pacific Rim. The book contributes to American art history the study of a characteristic but as yet overlooked format and models for the discipline a new and productive framework of analysis focused on the fundamental yet complex way images work back and forth with one another.