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Keys to Drawing with Imagination: Strategies and Exercises for Gaining Confidence and Enhancing Your Creativity, by Bert Dodson

I love this book!  While Keys to Drawing was published in 2006, I’ve only recently discovered it.  It contains “58 strategies, 36 exercises, and 13 step-by-step demonstrations” to get creativity flowing.  There is stuff like Escher tiling, sequences. making the familiar strange, distortion grids, and much more. The spiral binding keeps the book flat for those times you have your sketchbook out and want to give some of the ideas of whirl.  It gives instruction on doodling, as does some of the small doodling books that are very popular, but it pushes the doodles ideas and goes into many more ideas. The amount of fun and helpful ideas crammed into the 192 pages of this book (published by North Light Books) is darn impressive.  There is also work and info from 30 other artists. This book goes into my favorites bookcase.

Surface Treatment Workshop: Explore 45 Mixed-Media Techniques, by Darlene Olivia McElroy Sandra Dura-Wilson

Have you ever gone to the Sunday Sampler (or Friday Sampler) at Quilt Festival?  It’s a collection of some 30 teachers who demonstrate a particular technique in short segments of time.  Each time a segment concludes, attendees can move to a new demonstration.  While I suspect it’s hard on the teachers, it’s a great way for students to be exposed to a variety of techniques in a short amount of time.  Surface Treatment Workshop is similar in that in two-page spreads, there are 45 different mixed media techniques explained within the 144 pages of the book.  No one technique goes into deep detail, but that’s what I like.  There is plenty to experiment with.  Techniques include additive, resist, and subtractive or combination. For example, there is stamping, foils, masking tape, crackle paste, stucco and pumice gel, embossing, rubbing alcohol, painted leaf, and much more.  I like that archival quality is discussed, and variations and trouble shooting is included.  The book was published in 2011 by North Light Books.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 24th, 2011 at 12:20 am and is filed under Book Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.