Improve Your Art with Basics and Beyond As an artist, you encounter a steady stream of tips, truths, and techniques about making art. In this book, award-winning painter Marjorie Sarnat provides a user-friendly collection of her own artistic gems to explore and adapt for yourself. Every secret in this book is offered in easy-to-grasp text passages with an eye towards enhancing your artistic abilities. In this all new book in the Art Studio Secrets series, you'll learn ways to: Develop a signature style Use color that delights Create compositions that work Sharpen your drawing skills Apply materials in unique ways Keep the creative spark burning These tips, techniques, and ideas are presented practical terms and organized into 12 chapters, including 35 ideas for doing artwork with kids. All are provided to help you get the results you want in your art. Among this entire collection, even one or two simple ideas can ignite your artistic expression.

Winner: Best Art Book, Non-Fiction, Global eBook Awards, August 2011 Winner: Best Book Cover, Non-Fiction, Global eBook Awards, August 2011 As artists we each discover and employ ways of working that become part of our personal expression and our signature style. In her own artistic journey, author and artist Marjorie Sarnat has discovered, improvised, learned and gathered a wide array of hands-on tips, techniques, and inspirations for making art. Now she has collected them in this book and offers them for serious artists of any level. There are over 60 ideas for doing artwork with creative kids, as well. This body of knowledge is presented as quick and simple passages organized into 12 sections. You will learn: Intriguing Visual Illusions - Keep your audience wondering how they were done The New Mixed Media - Unusual ways to work with acrylics, metallics, egg tempera, and even kitchen ingredients Art Materials Redefined - New ideas for incorporating never-before-tried natural and man-made materials in your artwork Penny Pinching Productivity - Cost-saving ways to obtain and manage your art tools and materials Compelling Color and Composition - Understand their power and how to make deliberate choices to harness their emotional appeal Every "secret" in this book is offered in practical terms with an eye toward boosting your creative output as an artist. This collection will help you create better artwork, apply new and unusual methods and materials, and will ignite your artistic expression.

Award-winning illustrator and painter Marjorie Sarnat presents an outstanding refresher course in creative thinking, suitable for artists of every level. In this guide, she shares the tips and techniques she's discovered in the course of her personal experiences and explorations. These 300 quick, easily grasped text passages detail methods for adding inspiration and innovation to your creative process. The new, hands-on approaches to materials, painting surfaces, and texture applications can help you find a fresh angle for your style or break through a creative block. Every "secret" in this book is expressed in practical terms geared toward boosting your artistic abilities. From sharpening your drawing skills and applying media in unique ways to creating intriguing visual illusions and refining your choices of color and composition, this guide is loaded with advice and fresh ideas. You'll also find cost-saving ways to obtain and manage your art tools and supplies as well as scores of ideas for making art with creative kids.

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.

"A fun-filled art activity book that will encourage kids to express themselves while teaching them about key artistic styles and a selection of pioneering artists from history"--

Forget the 10,000 hour rule— what if it’s possible to learn the basics of any new skill in 20 hours or less? Take a moment to consider how many things you want to learn to do. What’s on your list? What’s holding you back from getting started? Are you worried about the time and effort it takes to acquire new skills—time you don’t have and effort you can’t spare? Research suggests it takes 10,000 hours to develop a new skill. In this nonstop world when will you ever find that much time and energy? To make matters worse, the early hours of prac­ticing something new are always the most frustrating. That’s why it’s difficult to learn how to speak a new language, play an instrument, hit a golf ball, or shoot great photos. It’s so much easier to watch TV or surf the web . . . In The First 20 Hours, Josh Kaufman offers a systematic approach to rapid skill acquisition— how to learn any new skill as quickly as possible. His method shows you how to deconstruct com­plex skills, maximize productive practice, and remove common learning barriers. By complet­ing just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice you’ll go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well. Kaufman personally field-tested the meth­ods in this book. You’ll have a front row seat as he develops a personal yoga practice, writes his own web-based computer programs, teaches himself to touch type on a nonstandard key­board, explores the oldest and most complex board game in history, picks up the ukulele, and learns how to windsurf. Here are a few of the sim­ple techniques he teaches: Define your target performance level: Fig­ure out what your desired level of skill looks like, what you’re trying to achieve, and what you’ll be able to do when you’re done. The more specific, the better. Deconstruct the skill: Most of the things we think of as skills are actually bundles of smaller subskills. If you break down the subcompo­nents, it’s easier to figure out which ones are most important and practice those first. Eliminate barriers to practice: Removing common distractions and unnecessary effort makes it much easier to sit down and focus on deliberate practice. Create fast feedback loops: Getting accu­rate, real-time information about how well you’re performing during practice makes it much easier to improve. Whether you want to paint a portrait, launch a start-up, fly an airplane, or juggle flaming chain­saws, The First 20 Hours will help you pick up the basics of any skill in record time . . . and have more fun along the way.

** A New York Times Bestseller ** NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: Time • The New Yorker • NPR • GQ • Elle • Vulture • Fortune • Boing Boing • The Irish Times • The New York Public Library • The Brooklyn Public Library "A complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto."—Jonah Engel Bromwich, The New York Times Book Review One of President Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of 2019" Porchlight's Personal Development & Human Behavior Book of the Year In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can still win back our lives. Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. And we must actively and continuously choose how we use it. We might not spend it on things that capitalism has deemed important … but once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress. Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book will change how you see your place in our world.

A National Book Critics Circle Finalist for Criticism A deeply Malcolmian volume on painters, photographers, writers, and critics. Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer, as well as her books about Sylvia Plath and Gertrude Stein, are canonical in the realm of nonfiction—as is the title essay of this collection, with its forty-one "false starts," or serial attempts to capture the essence of the painter David Salle, which becomes a dazzling portrait of an artist. Malcolm is "among the most intellectually provocative of authors," writes David Lehman in The Boston Globe, "able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight." Here, in Forty-one False Starts, Malcolm brings together essays published over the course of several decades (largely in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books) that reflect her preoccupation with artists and their work. Her subjects are painters, photographers, writers, and critics. She explores Bloomsbury's obsessive desire to create things visual and literary; the "passionate collaborations" behind Edward Weston's nudes; and the character of the German art photographer Thomas Struth, who is "haunted by the Nazi past," yet whose photographs have "a lightness of spirit." In "The Woman Who Hated Women," Malcolm delves beneath the "onyx surface" of Edith Wharton's fiction, while in "Advanced Placement" she relishes the black comedy of the Gossip Girl novels of Cecily von Zeigesar. In "Salinger's Cigarettes," Malcolm writes that "the pettiness, vulgarity, banality, and vanity that few of us are free of, and thus can tolerate in others, are like ragweed for Salinger's helplessly uncontaminated heroes and heroines." "Over and over," as Ian Frazier writes in his introduction, "she has demonstrated that nonfiction—a book of reporting, an article in a magazine, something we see every day—can rise to the highest level of literature." One of Publishers Weekly's Best Nonfiction Books of 2013