"The beauty of nature has inspired some of the world's greatest artwork. Now, with the help of Zentangle art, artists of all capabilities can create their own nature-themed masterpieces. This engaging volume uses colorful illustrations and concise step-by-step instructions to introduce readers to Zentangle patterns that combine to make beautiful works of art. Unique projects encourage readers to relax, stay focused, and find their own creativity....

Episode two features Miriam Colon and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater Company (PRTT) of New York, Tejana musical artist Selena, and the Santero art tradition of New Mexico. This episode unveils the stories of New Mexico artisans known as Santeros who engage in an art form heavily steeped in history and tradition. Santeros present an interesting juxtaposition of imposed religion and Native American culture. Santero artists Charlie Carrillo and Nick...

The Latino Mural Movement of the 1960's, Nuyorican spoken word, and editorial cartoonist Lalo Lopez are featured in the first episode of the series. Created in New York, Nuyorican spoken word is a form of artistic expression that emerged from the tumultuous 1960s and continues to influence and inspire the American Puerto Rican community. The episode includes interviews with Nuyorican poets Pedro Pietri, Piri Thomas and Caridad (La Bruja)..

Episode five highlights the Taco Shop Poets of Southern California, early tent theater of the Southwest called Carpas, and performance art in San Francisco. Performance artists covered include Guillermo Gomez-PeA±a, performance troupe ASCO, and the performance art pioneers Royal Chicano Airforce. The Taco Shop Poets, a group of Chicano poets living in San Diego, blend the spoken word with lively beats. The poets strive to take their social and political...

"Nothing Ventured heralds the start of a brand new series in the style of Jeffrey Archer's #1 New York Times bestselling Clifton Chronicles: introducing Detective William Warwick. But this is not a detective story, this is a story about the making of a detective . . . William Warwick has always wanted to be a detective, and decides, much to his father's dismay, that rather than become a lawyer like his father, Sir Julian Warwick QC, and his sister...

Examine geometric and "organic" shapes in painting and sculpture and the crucial relationship of figure to ground and mass to space. Then, explore the illusionistic use of shading, shadows, and overlapping shapes in Caravaggio's and Friedrich's works, and the compositional power of shapes in paintings such as Matisse's "Dance" and Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam".

In canvases of Millet, Courbet, and Manet, observe the Realist ideals of honesty, simplicity, and descriptive colors in revealing contemporary experience. Then, explore the phenomenon of Impressionism, highlighting Renoir, Monet, and Degas - their fascination with natural light, quest to capture the moment, and iconic subject matter of middle-class leisure life.

Across the centuries, self-portraits fascinatingly reveal the changing role of the artist. Follow this progression, from Renaissance painters subtly placing themselves within large compositions, to self-portraiture's emergence as a major form of self-revelation, noting many dramatic and colorful traditions within the form.

John Muir Laws's guide to drawing birds is itself winged, soaring between a devotion not only to art but also to the lives, forms, and postures of the birds themselves. Here, artistic technique and the exquisite details of natural history intertwine, and drawing becomes the vehicle for seeing. As Laws writes, "To draw feathers, you must understand how feathers grow, overlap, and insert into the body. To create the body, you must have an understanding...

Vija Celmins is one of the most important artists of the postwar generation. She is best known for her drawings of the ocean and the galaxies of the night sky. These brilliant works were mostly realized during a seventeen year period when she stopped painting altogether in order to explore drawing. In her forty year retrospective at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles she recalls her beginnings in abstraction, her choices of subject matter after she...