Experience wonder and excitement as you mindfully take your painting technique to the next level: It’s Paint Alchemy. Part of the new Alchemy series, Paint Alchemy explores how to build a painting practice. Whether you’re a novice or an experienced painter, you’ll learn how to create freely by combining a foundation in solid techniques and design principles with an open approach that stays focused on the moment, rather than the end result. You will learn how to prepare your art space, work with intention, and move between action and observation, responding to the work along the way. Paint Alchemy will help you cultivate a full perspective on the process: from developing ideas in a sketchbook to crystalizing your vision. As you work through the exercises, you’ll gain a better understanding of color theory, mark making, representational form, abstraction, and composition. Mindfulness, experimentation, and reflection will give way to wonder as your paintings develop.

A fascinating look at how pigments were created, used, and revered in the Middle Ages.

Here, Elkins argues that alchemists and painters have similar relationships to the substances they work with. Both try to transform the substance, while seeking to transform their own experience.

Since antiquity, artists have mixed pigments and secret ingredients together to create textured paint with particular sheen and luminosity. Achieve that same wizardry by unlocking the secrets of paint alchemy. Mix and transform your own paints to invent colors just for you and your home--at a fraction of the cost of store-bought cans. More than 50 unique recipes, each illustrated with a swatch showing the finished paint and enchanting interior photographs, demystify the complex principles of paint formulation. Special sections offer information on how to grind pigments, basic rules for safe handling of materials, organic pigments, and how to give your paint distinct characteristics--more or less intensity, for example--as well as exciting ideas for alternative recipes and inspirational suggestions for devising unusual paint effects. Concoct a batch of Mellow Silk, Translucent Veil, Gold Varnish, or any of the other brews, and stir up some magic in your home.

A classic book on the craft of painting including technique and materials.

Alchemy, Jung, and Remedios Varo offers a depth psychological analysis of the art and life of Remedios Varo, a Spanish surrealist painter. The book uses Varo’s paintings in a revolutionary way: to critique the patriarchal underpinnings of Jungian psychology, alchemy, and Surrealism, illuminating how Varo used painting to address cultural complexes that silence female expression. The book focuses on how the practice of alchemical psychology, through the power of imagination and the archetypal Feminine, can lead to healing and transformation for individuals and culture. Alchemy, Jung, and Remedios Varo offers the first in-depth psychological treatment of the role alchemy played in the friendship between Varo and Leonora Carrington—a connection that led to paintings that protest the pitfalls of patriarchy. This unique book will be of great interest for academics, scholars, and post-graduate students in the fields of analytical psychology, art history, Surrealism, cultural criticism, and Jungian studies.

In Digital Alchemy, acclaimed printmaker Bonny Pierce Lhotka shows how to turn your standard inkjet printer into a seemingly magical instrument capable of transforming your printed images into true works of art. Using plenty of visuals and straightforward terms, Lhotka walks you step-by-step through over a dozen projects. Forget printing on boring old paper, in Digital Alchemy, you’ll learn how to transfer and print images to a variety of surfaces including metal, wood, fabric, stone, and plastic using the techniques Lhotka’s spent years developing. If you’re a photographer looking for new ways to personalize your work or a digital artist who’s ready to take your work to the next level, you’ll find all of the tools, techniques, and inspiration you need in this book. Lhotka’s enthusiasm for experimenting with unusual printing materials and processes has led her to create new and amazing transfer techniques, including one that resembles a PolaroidTM transfer on steroids. She also shows you how to make prints using unexpected, everyday materials such as hand sanitizer and gelatin. You’ll even learn direct printing, the technique for sending your custom substrate through your printer almost as if it were paper. In Digital Alchemy, you’ll learn how to: Transfer images to metal, wood, plastic, and other materials that will not feed through an inkjet printer Print directly on metal for a fraction of the cost of using a print service Simulate a print from an expensive UV flatbed printer using an inexpensive desktop printer Use carrier sheets and paintable precoats to print on almost any surface Achieve near-lithographic quality digital prints with transfer processes to uncoated fine art paper In addition to the tutorials in the book, you can watch Lhotka in action on the included DVD-ROM, which has over 60 minutes of video footage where you’ll learn how to perform an alcohol gel transfer, transfer an image to a wooden surface, use your inkjet printer to achieve remarkable prints, and more. Simply insert the DVD-ROM into your computer's DVD drive. Note, this DVD-ROM will not work in TV DVD players.

From Egyptian wall paintings to the Venetian Renaissance, impressionism to digital images, Philip Ball tells the fascinating story of how art, chemistry, and technology have interacted throughout the ages to render the gorgeous hues we admire on our walls and in our museums. Finalist for the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award.

America's racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of "whiteness studies" and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants "race" has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities, in becoming American, were re-racialized to become Caucasian.

Featuring more than 150 treasures from several of the world’s most prestigious collections, Making Marvels explores the vital intersection of art, technology, and political power at the courts of early modern Europe. It was there, from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, that a remarkable outpouring of creativity and learning gave rise to exquisite objects that were at once beautiful works of art and technological wonders. By amassing vast, glittering collections of these ingeniously crafted objects, princes flaunted their wealth and competed for mastery over the known world. More than mere status symbols, however, many of these marvels ushered in significant advancements that have had a lasting influence on astronomy, engineering, and even international politics. Incisive texts by leading scholars situate these works within the rich, complex symbolism of life at court, where science and splendor were pursued with equal vigor and together contributed to a culture of magnificence.