Illustrating Nature: Right-Brain Art in a Left-Brain World - Softcover

Irene Brady

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0915965089 ISBN 13: 9780915965083

Publisher: Nature Works, 2004

Synopsis

Illustrating Nature ~ Right-brain Art in a Left-brain World is the secret doorway to realistic drawing – open this book and find the kind of instruction that you’ve always wanted.

Even if nature isn’t your all-time hot interest, the bountiful illustrations, generous tips, and step-by-step tutorials focusing on natural objects you can find anywhere, anytime, will give you a jump-start on any other type of subject you choose, from still-life compositions to action figures to landscapes. This book sets you off on a trail of adventure ~ and who knows where it will lead! Dive into this book to discover how you can make your pencil do what you tell it to do. Use your new-found skills to improve your paintings, sketch in your field journal, design and illustrate your own business or greeting cards, or create a home school curriculum for your kids – whatever you desire.

This book is for ages 13 and up;– from college students and art-loving teens, to adults looking for a new career or simply wanting to develop their creative skills.

Written by an award-winning nature book author and college-level instructor in scientific illustration, the text is superbly crafted to make sense to the creative person of any age.

Here are some of the amazing things you can do with this book:

Improve the connections between your creative right brain and your organized left brain to create a stunning working partnership. You’ll be astonished at the things you can do.

Discover techniques of observing a subject, so that you can transmit instructions through your hand and pencil to the paper with accuracy, speed and style.

Learn how to sketch living, moving animals using multiple working sketches and additive techniques to achieve vibrant finished drawings.

Explore tricks that will enable you to draw fur, scales, wood, feathers, wrinkles, hair fuzz, and other textures found in nature and elsewhere.

See shadows and shading the way the professional artist does, and learn how to give your drawings three-dimensional depth with shadows and highlights.

Master the mysteries of design to create handsome and interesting drawings, displays, and posters ~ anything you want.

Learn how to use a computer graphics program to improve your artwork in ways that would be difficult or impossible by hand.

Work your way through a hands-on, step-by-step computer scan of your artwork, including guidelines for combining graphic files with text to produce publishable artwork.

Understand techniques and ways to critique, fine-tune and improve your own art when you don’t have an unbiased expert or teacher to help you out.

Find a whole new artistic consciousness within yourself ~and a great deal more ~ in this sturdy book with a stay-open binding, designed for easy use.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Finally, a book that shows you, step-by-step, how to get the artistic results you want. Other art instructional books show you the beautiful final product (and if you’re lucky, a couple of interim steps) but leave you pretty much hanging in the wind about how to get from point A to point B. And few of them give you any background about HOW and WHY it all works together to get you to your final goal. Have you ever seen a book that shows you how to draw moving objects with confidence and skill? Illustrating Nature, Right-brain Art in a Left-brain World does. And that's just the beginning!

This book is designed to make art logical, simple, doable and fun. Improving your artistic prowess can be as simple as picking and choosing from a lavish array of simple tricks to improve your skills, or as involved as going through the book step by step to arrive at a point where you can draw what you see with confidence and pride.

We’ve never seen another book like this. It is being used by homeschoolers to give their children the skills to illustrate their journals and assignments (and entertain themselves!). College classes are using it as a textbook to learn scientific illustration. And it’s being used by ordinary people to learn how to do what they’ve always dreamed of – to be able to draw exactly what they see.

If art instructional books that promised a lot but left you scratching your head and filling trash baskets with wadded-up sketches have put you off before, try this one for a refreshing change.

We think this unique book is going to give Betty Robert’s book, Drawing From the Right Side of the Brain, some heavy competition.

From the Author:

This book began several years ago as a collection of handouts for an illustration class which accepted students at all levels of art proficiency – from close to zero to college art majors. Out of necessity, I had to polish it into a form that could be used at all levels of skill.

It remained just an expanding accumulation of handouts until my students, non-student acquaintances, and homeschoolers started begging me to put them together into a book they could use outside the class.

So I did. The exercises and projects in this book have been tested, critiqued, enriched and polished by hundreds of eager, sharp-eyed students. Their work is found throughout the book right alongside my own – a distillation of what I have taught them plus all they have taught me. This collaboration has produced a no-frills manual starting with basics, proceeding to advanced techniques, and capable of producing accomplished artists by the end of the book.

It’s tried and true, whatever your artistic background, if you put your heart into it. Enjoy!

About this edition

• Publisher: Nature Works
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0915965089
• ISBN 13: 9780915965083
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 166