These essays trace the "femme fatale" across literature, visual culture and cinema, exploring the ways in which fatal femininity has been imagined in different cultural contexts and historical epochs, and moving from mythical women such as Eve, Medusa and the Sirens via historical figures such as Mata Hari to fatal women in contemporary cinema.

Combining ink with dry coloured pencil is an innovative technique that integrates two very different media, resulting in rich and detailed work. This beautiful book looks at different methods of mark-making in ink and a repertoire of coloured pencil techniques, then explains how to work with them together successfully. Drawing on the author's love of the countryside and its plant communities, it shows how the technique can be used to interpret the landscape in a new and highly individual way. Packed with step-by-step sequences and finished examples, this book will encourage beginners to get started and inspire artists looking for a new direction.

These essays trace the femme fatale across literature, visual culture and cinema, exploring the ways in which fatal femininity has been imagined in different cultural contexts and historical epochs, and moving from mythical women such as Eve, Medusa and the Sirens via historical figures such as Mata Hari to fatal women in contemporary cinema.

The technical crafts of sound in classical Hollywood cinema have, until recently, remained largely 'unsung' by histories of the studio era. Yet film sound - voice, music and sound effects - is a crucial aspect of film style and has been key to engaging and holding audiences since the transition to sound by Hollywood's major studios in 1929. This innovative new text restores sound technicians to Hollywood's creative history. Exploring a range of films from the early sound period (1931) through to the late studio period (1948), and drawing on a wide range of archival sources, the book reveals how Hollywood's sound designers worked and why they worked in the ways that they did. The book demonstrates how sound technicians developed conventions designed to tell stories through sound, placing them within the production cultures of studio era filmmaking, and uncovering a history of collective and collaborative creativity. In doing so, it traces the emergence of a body of highly skilled sound personnel, able to apply expert technical knowledge in the science of sound to the creation of cinematic soundscapes that are alive with mood and sensation.