Beginning with a small girl in West Kirby obsessed with comics, Shirley Hughes' story takes us through World War II, and to a career which began with Art School in a blitzed Liverpool, led to Oxford and then to London, illustrated with her own art work.

Augusta and Owen have taken the leap. Leaving the city and its troubling memories behind, they have moved to the country for a solitary life where they can devote their days to each other and their art, where Gus can paint and Owen can write. But the facts of a past betrayal prove harder to escape than urban life. Ancient jealousies and resentments haunt their marriage and their rural paradise. When Alison Hemmings moves into the empty house next door, Gus is drawn out of isolation, despite her own qualms and Owen's suspicions. As the new relationship deepens, the lives of the two households grow more and more tightly intertwined. It will take only one new arrival to intensify emotions to breaking point. Fierce, honest and astonishingly gripping, Life Drawing by Robin Black is a novel as beautiful and unsparing as the human heart.

Along with working from the model, the figure-drawing student needs instruction in anatomy, history, and conceptual approaches; such instruction is often missing from life drawing classes due to time constraints. This text offers these elements, along with a visual reminder of studio practice. The chapters follow the natural development of a student's growth, from gesture drawing to personal exploration. An entire chapter on drawing the figure in perspective offers information unavailable in comparable texts. Asking the student to begin with quick sketches and gesture drawings establishes their significance in professional work, while giving students a non-threatening introduction on a level they can understand and master. Cohesive presentation of anatomy, including a chapter on the human head, helps students understand underlying structure of bones, muscle, and body fat. Larger images throughout promote clearer understanding of concepts. A completely new section on color media provides up-to-date valuable information. Anatomy of the limbs has been reorganized for clarity.

Drawing activities, art instruction, and advice for artists and non-artists alike. Urban sketching--the process of drawing on the go as a regular practice--is a hot trend in the drawing world. It's also a practical necessity for creatively minded people in a busy world. In this aspirational guide, self-taught French artist France Belleville-Van Stone emboldens readers to craft a ritual of their own and devote more time to art, even if it's just 10 minutes a day. She offers motivation to move beyond the comfort zone, as well as instruction on turning rough sketches into finished work. Belleville Van-Stone learned how to draw through her own daily practice and knows first-hand how hard it is to find time to incorporate creativity into a busy life. She encourages and teaches us how to do it with advice and guidance such as: · An A-to-Z list of daily sketch prompts, from airports to bananas, faces to hands, meetings and workplaces · Tips on what drawing supplies you can and should have--and how to carry them around · Sections on accepting mistakes, drawing with limited resources, and redefining completion · Plusses and minuses of going digital, including apps, styluses, and brushes For those of us who dream of drawing in the minutes between school and work, bathtime and bedtime, and waking and walking out the door, the practical advice in Sketch! is a revelation. By sharing her own creative process, Belleville-Van Stone Sketch inspires artists both established and aspiring to rethink their daily practice, sketch for the pure joy of it, and document their lives and the world around them.

Deleuze's publications have attracted enormous attention, but scant attention has been paid to the existential relevance of Deleuze's writings. In the lineage of Nietzsche, Life Drawing develops a fully affirmative Deleuzean aesthetics of existence.For Foucault and Nehamas, the challenge of an aesthetics of existence is to make your life, in one way or another, a work of art. In contrast, Bearn argues that art is too narrow a concept to guide this kind of existential project. He turns instead to the more generous notion of beauty, but he argues that the philosophical tradition has mostly misconceived beauty in terms of perfection. Heraclitus and Kant are well-known exceptions to this mistake, and Bearn suggests that because Heraclitean becoming is beyond conceptual characterization, it promises a sensualized experience akin to what Kant called free beauty. In this new aesthetics of existence, the challengeis to become beautiful by releasing a Deleuzean becoming: becoming becoming. Bearn's readings of philosophical texts--by Wittgenstein, Derrida, Plato, and others--will be of interest in their own right.

Autobiography has seen enormous expansions and challenges over the past decades. One of these expansions has been in comics, and it is an expansion that pushes back against any postmodern notion of the death of the author/subject, while also demanding new approaches from critics. Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art is a collection of essays about autobiography, semi-autobiography, fictionalized autobiography, memory, and self-narration in sequential art, or comics. Contributors come from a range of academic backgrounds including English, American studies, comparative literature, gender studies, art history, and cultural studies. The book engages with well-known figures such as Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and Alison Bechdel; with cult-status figures such as Martin Vaughn-James; and with lesser-known works by artists such as Frédéric Boilet. Negotiations between artist/writer/body and drawn/written/text raise questions of how comics construct identity, and are read and perceived, requiring a critical turn towards theorizing the comics' viewer. At stake in comic memoir and semi-autobiography is embodiment. Remembering a scene with the intent of rendering it in sequential art requires nonlinear thinking and engagement with physicality. Who was in the room and where? What was worn? Who spoke first? What images dominated the encounter? Did anybody smile? Man or mouse? Unhinged from the summary paragraph, the comics artist must confront the fact of the flesh, or the corporeal world, and they do so with fascinating results.

The human figure, with its myriad curves and contours, can be challenging for anyone to draw. In this invaluable reference, well-known art instructor and author E. L. Koller simplifies the process, making it easy for artists to learn new methods of rendering the figure—in action and repose—with accuracy and style. Using figure-drawing exercises, numerous photos, and illustrations, Koller reduces the task at hand into manageable steps for intermediate and advanced artists. Beginning with drawing basics, this step-by-step guide explores the structure of the human figure and the comparative proportions of child and adult figures, showing how to depict individual parts of the head and body, facial expressions, and gestures. It also shows the merits of sketching from memory; drawing from casts, photographs, and living models; and sketching both undraped and costumed figures. Once the still figure is mastered, the artist can explore the more challenging action poses, including walking, running, and catching. Filled with guidance and insight on the human form, Life Drawing is an essential addition to every artist's reference shelf.