The Arts: Treatments & subjects Books

An inspiring collection of drawings and articles exploring the sketchbooks and artistic practices of 50 talented character artists.Sketches and drawings are the foundations of great art, where thoughts and concepts first come to life as an image. In...

Discover the world of digital artist Lois van Baarle, a.k.a. Loish, in this high-quality collection of her most beautiful work.Lois van Baarle is a freelance animator/illustrator from the Netherlands who graduated in 2009 from the Hogeschool voor de...

How to Keep a Sketch Journal is the essential travel-sized guide to keeping a visual diary of your surroundings. Whether you're a habitual sketcher or just starting out, this book will teach you how to improve your observational sketching, indoors or...

A comprehensive human anatomy guide for today's 3D artist, offering fundamental, theoretical and practical skills in anatomy and proportion.Anatomy for 3D Artists is an essential teaching guide for sculpting human anatomy. Non-software specific,...

Exhibition Prosthetics by Joseph Grigely explores the artist's use of language and images as a means of representation that further the reach of the real. Grigely uses the term 'exhibition prosthetics' to describe an array of these conventions,...

This, Vanguard's second volume devoted to the work of J. Allen St. John concentrates on the artist's full-color fantasy, science-fiction and adventure paintings for novels and Pulp-magazines for famous authors, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack Williamson,...

Acclaimed monograph on the World's most famous monster portrait artist.Basil Gogos changed the face of classic horror with his film monster portrait art. Like a bizarro-world Norman Rockwell, he created magazine covers of Frankenstein, the Creature from...

This remarkable compilation brings together the best of painter Jota Leal's surreal celebrity portraits. This volume has something for anybody who is captivated by the famous and iconic figures around us. Whimsical and incisive portraits of rock stars,...

Garry Fabian Miller's Dark Room is a photography book unlike any other. At its heart is the artist's description of a life lived making pictures between the dark and the light, a deeply personal account woven against the history of photography from the...

William Henry Fox Talbot is celebrated today as the English inventor of photography. He made early photographic experiments in the 1830s, released the details of his photogenic drawing process in January 1839, and introduced important innovations to the...

William Henry Fox Talbot, the English inventor of photography, created around 15,000 photographs in the nineteenth century, most of them attempts to produce compelling scientific documents or pictorial records of the world around him. However, among...

Rachel Owen's hauntingly beautiful illustrations for Dante's Inferno take a radically new approach to representing the world of Dante's famous poem. The images combine the artist's deep cultural and historical understanding of 'The Divine...

Plump apricots, juicy mangoes, crisp lettuce. We're used to seeing close-up photographs of beautiful fruits and vegetables in cookbooks and garden guides. But these detailed illustrations of fruit and vegetables, as viewed through...

Built between 1855 and 1860, Oxford University Museum of Natural History is the extraordinary result of close collaboration between artists and scientists. Inspired by John Ruskin, the architect Benjamin Woodward and the Oxford scientists worked with...

The Merton library is rightly known for its antiquity, its beautiful medieval and early modern architecture and fittings and for its remarkable and important collection of manuscripts and rare books, yet a nineteenth-century plan to tear the medieval...

Beachcombing, overturning a boulder, or simply parting the strands of seaweed in a rock pool can offer a glimpse into a thriving underwater world of astonishing creatures. Starfish which, upon losing an arm, can grow a new one; ethereal moon jellyfish...

During the Renaissance, artists and illustrators developed the representation of truthful three-dimensional forms into a highly skilled art. As reliable illustrations of three-dimensional subjects became more prevalent, they also influenced the way in...

Every map tells a story. Some provide a narrative for travellers, explorers and surveyors or offer a visual account of changes to people's lives, places and spaces, while others tell imaginary tales, transporting us to fictional worlds created by writers...

Homecoming, haunting, nostalgia, desire: these are some of the themes evoked by the beguiling motif of the lighted window in literature and art. In this innovative combination of place-writing, memoir and cultural study, Peter Davidson takes us on...

Representing four centuries of collecting and a thousand years of Jewish history, this book brings together Hebrew manuscripts and rare books from the Bodleian Library and Oxford colleges. Highlights of the extraordinary collections include a fragment of...

Martin Lister, royal physician and fellow of the Royal Society, was an extraordinarily prolific natural historian with an expertise in shells and molluscs.Disappointed with the work of established artists, Lister decided to teach his daughters, Susanna...

The range of J. R. R. Tolkien's talents is remarkable. Not only was he an accomplished linguist and philologist, as well as a scholar of Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature and Norse folklore, but also a skillful illustrator and storyteller. Drawing on...

How were the first fonts made? Who invented italics? When did we work out how to print in colour?Many of the standard features of printed books were designed by pioneering typographers and printers in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Although...

When Falstaff calls upon the sky to rain potatoes in The Merry Wives of Windsor, he is highlighting the late sixteenth-century belief that the exotic vegetable, recently introduced to England from the Americas, was an aphrodisiac. In Romeo and Juliet,...

The Bodleian Library is home to treasures from every corner of the globe that mark major milestones in cultural history. This book contains twenty-six pull-out postcards-one for each letter of the alphabet-each featuring a rare or beautiful manuscript...

This stunning series of pocketbooks from Kew offers a snapshot into the diverse and beautiful world of plants and fungi. Each book lavishly showcases choice examples from different groups or collections.Hot, spicy, aromatic, zingy, oral, earthy and...

This stunning series of pocketbooks from Kew offers a snapshot into the diverse and beautiful world of plants and fungi. Each book lavishly showcases choice examples from different groups or collections.Part of our everyday lives, full of flavour and...

This stunning series of pocketbooks from Kew offers a snapshot into the diverse and beautiful world of plants. Kew Pocketbooks: Wildflowers lavishly showcases a meadow's worth of familiar plants in 40 botanical paintings. Kew Pocketbooks: Wildflowers is...

This is the first book to reveal artworks made using the world's brightest colour Pure Structural Colour, recently derived from the metallic-like colours of Pollia berries, hummingbirds and butterflies.Pure Structural Colour is a mimic of the type of...

Plants are an integral part of festivities around the world, used in religious, cultural and national celebrations. This Kew Pocketbook is packed full of 40 of these festive plants, from winter favourites such as holly, pines and mistletoe, to colourful...

This stunning series of pocketbooks from Kew offers a snapshot into the diverse and beautiful world of plants. Each book lavishly showcases choice examples from individual plant groups or collections, and in this pocketbook a selection of plants are...

This stunning series of pocketbooks from Kew offers a snapshot into the diverse and beautiful world of plants. Each book lavishly showcases choice examples from individual plant groups or collections, and this new title showcases Japanese plants, from...

Jan Hendrix is a Dutch-born, Mexico-based contemporary artist. His work is all about observation and analysis; nature and its diff erent ways of representing and telling extended stories, often in a non- linear narrative. Based on an exhibition...

The Library, Art and Archives at Kew is one of the most extensive botanical libraries in the world, with the oldest item dating back to the 1370s. In this new pocketbook series from Kew, each book presents 40 botanical paintings from the collection,...

The Library, Art and Archives at Kew is one of the most extensive botanical libraries in the world, with the oldest item dating back to the 1370s. In this new pocketbook series from Kew, each book presents 40 botanical paintings from the collection,...

An intrepid Victorian traveler and prolific painter, Marianne North produced more than eight-hundred paintings over her lifetime. She eschewed the soft pastels of typical botanical artists and instead painted entire landscapes using bold, hearty oil...

Artists' Kew reveals Kew in all its charming detail as well as in its full natural beauty by the Thames. The book contains 120 paintings, by 50 artists. The contemporary art shown in this book builds upon Kew's eclectic tradition: to inspire, to excite,...

Entertaining, shocking, uproarious, hilarious . . . like eavesdropping on a wake, as the mourners get gradually more drunk and tell ever more outrageous stories' Sunday Times This is the definitive history of London's most notorious drinking den, the...

Verdant with illustrations, a meditation upon the rootedness of trees in Wordsworth's writing and beyond.This is the first book to address William Wordsworth's profound identification of the spirit of nature in trees. It looks at what trees...

Kunstkammer, art and curiosity cabinets housed in a dedicated room or suite of chambers, were often filled with thousands of diverse and sometimes shocking objects reflecting the bounty of nature and human creativity.These could range from a cherry pit...

Offering particular insight into Filippino Lippi's artistic problem-solving, an innovative look at the Renaissance master. The first monograph in a generation, and the first study in English in over eighty years, this book presents a new understanding of...

Painter, poet and actor Salvator Rosa was one of the most engaging and charismatic personalities of seventeenth-century Italy. Although a gifted landscape painter, he longed to be seen as the pre-eminent philosopher-painter of his age. This new account...

In Counter-Texts, Kim Dhillon provides a much-needed critical reassessment of written language in contemporary art. Considering the politics, aesthetics and ethics of language, Dhillon explores artworks that use inscribed language, with a particular...

This is the first comprehensive study in English of surrealist leader Andre Breton's life-long commitment to the visual arts. As an essayist, art critic, collector, gallery director and artist, he actively promoted many painters, from Gustave...

Peter Paul Rubens was the most inventive and prolific northern European artist of his age. This book discusses his life and work in relation to three interrelated themes: spirit, ingenuity and genius. It argues that Rubens and his reception were pivotal...

The Venetian painter known as Giorgione or 'big George' died at a young age in the dreadful plague of 1510, possibly having painted fewer than twenty-five works. But many of these are among the most mysterious and alluring in the history of art...

Essential Desires: Contemporary Art in Thailand is the first major, fully illustrated survey of Thai art in thirty years. Brian Curtin shows how Thai artists negotiated their emergence on the global art stage while dealing with pan-Asian regionalism and...

Exploring the explosion of the Who onto the international music scene, this heavily illustrated book looks at this furious band as an embodiment of pop art. 'Ours is music with built-in hatred.' - Pete Townshend, cofounder of the...