If you want to discover the fun of collage then this fabulous book is the perfect kit. Collage artist Maria Rivans has gathered hundreds of beautiful, quirky, and downright daft images, and they're all here for you to cut out and stick. Flowers, birds, cats, and butterflies can be combined with buildings, eyes, moustaches, and catalog models in dubious pants to create extraordinary original artworks and talking pieces! Maria provides an introduction to collage styles and tips on technique. An ideal activity for young and old, this book is a perfect gift or self-purchase for anyone seeking arty fun and a great deal of sticky silliness!
Retro Graphics makes it easy for DIY designers to mimic the most prominent styles of the past hundred years. A plethora of authentic design modelsfrom Art Deco and Gothic Revival to Pop Art and Post Modernismare presented and broken down into their component parts in this handy sourcebook. These entries include step-by-step techniques, color palettes, typefaces, illustration styles, and ornamentation to help anyone create the look of such diverse materials as Victorian advertisements and pulp fiction book jackets. History can't be revived, but it can be simulated with this richly illustrated and meticulously researched visual encyclopedia.
The first full length graphic novel from the author of Shrimpy and Paul Enter the strange and wordplay-loving world of cartoonist and fine artist Marc Bell (Shrimpy and Paul, Hot Potatoe), where the All-Star Schnauzer Band runs things and tiny beings hold signs saying “It’s under control.” Our hapless hero Stroppy is minding his business, working a menial job in one of Monsieur Moustache’s factories, when a muscular fellah named Sean blocks up the assembly line. Sean’s there to promote an All-Star Schnauzer Band-organized songwriting contest, which he does enthusiastically, and at the expense of Stroppy’s livelihood, home, and face. In hopes for a cash prize, Stroppy submits a work by his friend Clancy The Poet to the contest. Mishaps and hilarity ensue and Stroppy is forced to go deep into the heart of Schnauzer territory to rescue his poet friend. Stroppy is Marc Bell’s triumphant return to comics; it’s also his first full-length graphic novella, one that thrums with jokes, hashtags, and made-up song lyrics. Densely detailed not-so-secret underground societies, little robots, and heavy weight humdingers leap off the page in full color. With Stroppy, Bell continues to explode the divide between fine art, doodling, and comics.
Is it possible to conceive of a Hello Kitty Middle Ages or a Tickle Me Elmo Renaissance? The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first reference to "cute" in the sense of "attractive, pretty, charming" to 1834. More recently, Sianne Ngai has offered a critical overview of the cuteness of the twentieth-century avant-garde within the context of consumer culture. But if cuteness can get under the skin, what kinds of surfaces does it best infiltrate, particularly in the framework of historical forms, events, and objects that traditionally have been read as emergences around "big" aesthetics of formal symmetries, high affects, and resemblances? The Retrofuturism of Cuteness seeks to undo the temporal strictures surrounding aesthetic and affective categories, to displace a strict focus on commodification and cuteness, and to interrogate how cuteness as a minor aesthetics can refocus our perceptions and readings of both premodern and modern media, literature, and culture. Taking seriously the retro and the futuristic temporalities of cuteness, this volume puts in conversation projects that have unearthed remnants of a "cult of cute"-positioned historically and critically in between transitions into secularization, capitalist frameworks of commodification, and the enchantment of objects-and those that have investigated the uncanny haunting of earlier aesthetics in future-oriented modes of cuteness. The Latin acutus, the etymological root of cute, embraces the sharpened, the pointed, the nimble, the discriminating, and the piercing. But as Michael O'Rourke notes, cuteness evokes a proximity that is at once potentially invasive and contaminating and yet softening and transfiguring. Deploying cuteness as a mode of inquiry across time, this volume opens up unexpected lines of inquiry and unusual critical and creative aporias, from Christian asceticism, medieval cycle drama, and Shakespeare to manga, Bollywood, and Second Life. The projects collected here point to a spectrum of aesthetic-affective assemblages related to racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and class dimensions that exceed or trouble our contemporary perceptions of such registers within object-subject and subject-object entanglements. TABLE OF CONTENTS // Wan-Chuan Kao and Jen Boyle, "Introduction: The Time of the Child"Andrea Denny-Brown, "Torturer-Cute"Elizabeth Howie, "Indulgence and Refusal: Cuteness, Asceticism, and the Aestheticization of Desire"Claire Maria Chambers, "From Awe to Awww: Cuteness and the Idea of the Holy in Christian Commodity Culture"Justin Mullis, "All The Pretty Little Ponies: Bronies, Desire, and Cuteness"Marlis Schweitzer, "Consuming Celebrity: Commodities and Cuteness in the Circulation of Master William Henry West Betty"Mariah Junglan Min, "Embracing the Gremlin: Judas Iscariot and the (Anti-)Cuteness of Despair"Alicia Corts, "Cute, Charming, Dangerous: Child Avatars in Second Life"James M. Cochran, "What's Cute Got to Do with It?: Early Modern Proto-Cuteness in King Lear"Kara Watts, "Hamlet, Hesperides, and the Discursivity of Cuteness"Tripthi Pillai, "Cute Lacerations in Doctor Faustus and Omkara"Kelly Lloyd, "Katie Sokoler, Your Construction Paper Tears Can't Hide Your Yayoi Kusama-Neurotic Underbelly"
“Pop culture is often maligned as fleeting, but history shows that sometimes what is pop in one culture has time-honored resonance in later ones. This book is an attempt to show that pop culture, especially as seen through the lenses of design, illustration, satiric and political art (and other things), is integral to a broader understanding of who we are and where we are going.”—Steven Heller, from the Introduction. How do popular culture and graphic design influence one another? What are the goals of design? Are they to sell? To package? To entertain? The answers to these questions are complicated and are intimately tied to the effect design has on the overall culture. POP is the first book to analyze the role of graphic design in the broader culture, as well as the impact of design on other art and entertainment forms, from album covers to baseball stadiums. Author Steven Heller addresses such subjects as: --pop icons --viral and guerilla advertising --political satire --the history of Interview, Monocle, Mad, and other magazines --illusionism and three-dimensional design --art for art’s sake --design vs. decoration --the return of hand lettering --art for the masses. POP spans over 150 years during which popular culture has influenced mass perception and behavior. Illustrated by more than fifty images, POP is sure to inspire both aspiring and experienced designers. Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.
Radicals and Realists is the first book in any language to discuss Japan’s avant-garde artists, their work, and the historical environment in which they produced it during the two most creative decades of the twentieth century, the 1950s and 1960s. Many of the artists were radicals, rebelling against existing canons and established authority. Yet at the same time they were realists in choosing concrete materials, sounds, and themes from everyday life for their art and in gradually adopting tactics of protest or resistance through accommodation rather than confrontation. Whatever the means of expression, the production of art was never devoid of historical context or political implication. Focusing on the nonverbal genres of painting, sculpture, dance choreography, and music composition, this work shows that generational and political differences, not artistic doctrines, largely account for the divergent stances artists took vis-a-vis modernism, the international arts community, Japan’s ties to the United States, and the alliance of corporate and bureaucratic interests that solidified in Japan during the 1960s. After surveying censorship and arts policy during the American occupation of Japan (1945–1952), the narrative divides into two chronological sections dealing with the 1950s and 1960s, bisected by the rise of an artistic underground in Shinjuku and the security treaty crisis of May 1960. The first section treats Japanese artists who studied abroad as well as the vast and varied experiments in each of the nonverbal avant-garde arts that took place within Japan during the 1950s, after long years of artistic insularity and near-stasis throughout war and occupation. Chief among the intellectuals who stimulated experimentation were the art critic Takiguchi Shuzo, the painter Okamoto Taro, and the businessman-painter Yoshihara Jiro. The second section addresses the multifront assault on formalism (confusingly known as "anti-art") led by visual artists nationwide. Likewise, composers of both Western-style and contemporary Japanese-style music increasingly chose everyday themes from folk music and the premodern musical repertoire for their new presentations. Avant-garde print makers, sculptors, and choreographers similarly moved beyond the modern—and modernism—in their work. A later chapter examines the artistic apex of the postwar period: Osaka’s 1970 world exposition, where more avant-garde music, painting, sculpture, and dance were on display than at any other point in Japan’s history, before or since. Radicals and Realists is based on extensive archival research; numerous concerts, performances, and exhibits; and exclusive interviews with more than fifty leading choreographers, composers, painters, sculptors, and critics active during those two innovative decades. Its accessible prose and lucid analysis recommend it to a wide readership, including those interested in modern Japanese art and culture as well as the history of the postwar years.
