There is more to a bird than simply feathers. And just because birds evolved from a single flying ancestor doesn't mean they are structurally the same. With 385 stunning drawings depicting 200 species, The Unfeathered bird is a richly illustrated book on bird anatomy that offers refreshingly original insights into what goes on beneath the feathered surface.
Capturing the Essence is a step-by-step personal guide – by one of Australia's greatest living bird artists – to observing, retaining the essential information and then painting birds from field notes and sketches, photographs and other field observations. The author takes the reader through the processes involved in oil painting, watercolour and acrylic techniques, and a piece of art is built up in stages to demonstrate the skills required in each of these media. While the book covers some of the general basics relevant to various kinds of painting of natural history subjects, the concentration is very much on birds. Painting or drawing any subject well, gives great satisfaction. In this book the author hopes to help the reader become competent at drawing and painting birds, or at least to enjoy trying!
Draw and paint beautiful, vibrant, and realistic birds and botanicals with The Art of Botanical & Bird Illustration. Take a sketch and transform it into fine art! The Art of Botanical & Bird Illustration is a guide for contemporary artists aspiring to master shape, color, and texture and render beautiful, realistic, and vibrant botanical artwork. Author Mindy Lighthipe, an expert botanical artist, educates you about the tools and materials traditionally used in botanical illustration, including pencils, colored pencils, watercolor, gouache, and pastels. This thorough yet easily digestible guide includes overviews of key illustration techniques and basic color theory and mixing, and it's loaded with exercises designed to help you learn to see shape, value, and form. By learning tounderstand plant life and anatomy, you can craft elegant flowers, leaves, trees, and much more in no time! To bring it all together, The Art of Botanical & Bird Illustration includes step-by-step demonstrations to follow along with as you practice taking sketches and transforming them into fully rendered, colorful pieces of fine art.
From horses and cats to elephants and giraffes, this is the definitive reference on animal anatomy for painters, sculptors, and illustrators. 104 halftones, 281 line drawings, 100 photos.
A master of animal portraiture presents an extensive course in creating lifelike drawings of wild and domestic creatures. Subjects include animal musculature, bone structure, psychology, movements, habits, and habitats. 123 illustrations.
Enlarged edition of a classic reference features clear directions for drawing horses, dogs, cats, lions, cattle, deer, and other creatures. Covers muscles, skeleton, and full external views. 288 illustrations.
Suitable for beginners as well as advanced artists, this guide provides in-depth studies of the shapes and visual construction of a variety of birds, from domestic fowl to birds on the wing.
All artists are tired of persuading their nearest and dearest to look sad…look glad…look mad…madder…no, even madder…okay, hold it. For those artists (and their long-suffering friends), here is the best book ever. Facial Expressions includes more than 2,500 photographs of 50 faces—men and women of a variety of ages, shapes, sizes, and ethnicities—each demonstrating a wide range of emotions and shown from multiple angles. Who can use this book? Oh, only every artist on the planet, including art students, illustrators, fine artists, animators, storyboarders, and comic book artists. But wait, there’s more! Additional photos focus on people wearing hats and couples kissing, while illustrations show skull anatomy and facial musculature. Still not enough? How about a one-of-a-kind series of photos of lips pronouncing the phonemes used in human speech? Animators will swoon—and artists will show a range of facial expressions from happy to happiest to ecstatic.
The human history of depicting birds dates to as many as 40,000 years ago, when Paleolithic artists took to cave walls to capture winged and other beasts. But the art form has reached its peak in the last four hundred years. In The Art of the Bird, devout birder and ornithologist Roger J. Lederer celebrates this heyday of avian illustration in forty artists’ profiles, beginning with the work of Flemish painter Frans Snyders in the early 1600s and continuing through to contemporary artists like Elizabeth Butterworth, famed for her portraits of macaws. Stretching its wings across time, taxa, geography, and artistic style—from the celebrated realism of American conservation icon John James Audubon, to Elizabeth Gould’s nineteenth-century renderings of museum specimens from the Himalayas, to Swedish artist and ornithologist Lars Jonsson’s ethereal watercolors—this book is feathered with art and artists as diverse and beautiful as their subjects. A soaring exploration of our fascination with the avian form, The Art of the Bird is a testament to the ways in which the intense observation inherent in both art and science reveals the mysteries of the natural world.