Explore the world of bubble letters as you transform words into doodles with this fun art activity book! Use the stylus included to trace along white outlines that form the shapes of each word or phrase -- like ''wow'' or ''cool'' -- that you'll find on each page.Then scratch off the black coating, adding your own designs to the bubble letters.You can draw furry letters that you turn into monsters, sugary letters for candy-writing, and more!There are 20 bubble letter style drawings in all to trace and create.Scratch book contains 10 black-coated gold or silver glitter pages and 10 black-coated colorful swirl pages.Includes 20 extra paper pages for your own artwork and bubble letter writing!Book comes with a wooden stylus for scratching away the black coating to reveal the shining glitter or brilliant colors beneath.6-3/8 inches wide by 8-1/2 inches high.

A collection of essays from today’s most acclaimed authors—from Cheryl Strayed to Roxane Gay to Jennifer Weiner, Alexander Chee, Nick Hornby, and Jonathan Franzen—on the realities of making a living in the writing world. In the literary world, the debate around writing and commerce often begs us to take sides: either writers should be paid for everything they do or writers should just pay their dues and count themselves lucky to be published. You should never quit your day job, but your ultimate goal should be to quit your day job. It’s an endless, confusing, and often controversial conversation that, despite our bare-it-all culture, still remains taboo. In Scratch, Manjula Martin has gathered interviews and essays from established and rising authors to confront the age-old question: how do creative people make money? As contributors including Jonathan Franzen, Cheryl Strayed, Roxane Gay, Nick Hornby, Susan Orlean, Alexander Chee, Daniel Jose Older, Jennifer Weiner, and Yiyun Li candidly and emotionally discuss money, MFA programs, teaching fellowships, finally getting published, and what success really means to them, Scratch honestly addresses the tensions between writing and money, work and life, literature and commerce. The result is an entertaining and inspiring book that helps readers and writers understand what it’s really like to make art in a world that runs on money—and why it matters. Essential reading for aspiring and experienced writers, and for anyone interested in the future of literature, Scratch is the perfect bookshelf companion to On Writing, Never Can Say Goodbye, and MFA vs. NYC.

Presents twenty drawing and design projects, including hieroglyphics, tattoos, super-heroes, and African sculpture.

Learn how to make the most out of your Sharpie Markers! Do you have a drawer or bin full of Sharpies that are going to waste? Or do you always want to buy new markers, but never have an excuse to use them? Now you do! How to Draw Sharpie Art has tutorials on all the quick and simple things you can use your Sharpie Marker on. Learn how to style up items such as: Napkins Flower pots Light switch plates Lamp shades Glassware Dinnerware Masks Christmas ornaments Pillowcases Picture frames Tennis shoes Phone cases Piggy banks And more! With easy to follow instructions, this book will show you just how to spruce up an assortment of items DIY style, with a rainbow of Sharpie colors to use, not just black! Learn how to decorate your home, your office, or make gifts for your friends and family. Make your everyday life just a little more colorful with How to Draw Sharpie Art!

Summary Hello, Scratch! is a how-to book that helps parents and kids work together to learn programming skills by creating new versions of old retro-style arcade games with Scratch. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology Can 8-year-olds write computer programs? You bet they can! In Scratch, young coders use colorful blocks and a rich graphical environment to create programs. They can easily explore ideas like input and output, looping, branching, and conditionals. Scratch is a kid-friendly language created by MIT that is a safe and fun way to begin thinking like a programmer, without the complexity of a traditional programming language. About the Book Hello Scratch! guides young readers through five exciting games to help them take their first steps in programming. They'll experiment with key ideas about how a computer program works and enjoy the satisfaction of immediate success. These carefully designed projects give readers plenty of room to explore by imagining, tinkering, and personalizing as they learn. What's Inside Learn by experimentation Learn to think like a programmer Build five exciting, retro-style games Visualize the organization of a program About the Readers Written for kids 8-14. Perfect for independent learning or working with a parent or teacher. About the Authors Kids know how kids learn. Sadie and Gabriel Ford, 12-year-old twins and a formidable art and coding team, wrote this book with editing help from their mother, author Melissa Ford! Table of Contents PART 1 - SETTING UP THE ARCADE Getting to know your way around Scratch Becoming familiar with the Art Editor Meeting Scratch's key blocks through important coding concepts PART 2 - TURNING ON THE MACHINES Designing a two-player ball-and-paddle game Using conditionals to build a two-player ball-and-paddle game PART 3 - CODING AND PLAYING GAMES Designing a fixed shooter Using conditionals to build your fixed shooter Designing a one-player ball-and-paddle game Using variables to build your one-player ball-and-paddle game Designing a simple platformer Using X and Y coordinates to make a simple platformer Making a single-screen platformer Using arrays and simulating gravity in a single-screen platformer Becoming a game maker

Graffiti is a controversial subject and fraught with ambiguities and contradictions. However, the recent global success of artists such as Banksy, Melbourne’s booming graffiti tourism, and the rise of the ‘creative city’ discourse, have blurred the lines between what some regard as vandalism and some as public art. As such, graffiti has increasingly become part of mainstream culture and in some countries has been promoted as a contributor to the urban environment. Thus, as practices and perceptions of graffiti shift, so does our need to better understand the role of graffiti in our urban environments. Through a case study of the Maboneng precinct, this GCRO Occasional Paper investigates the contribution made by graffiti to tourism and public and private investment in the inner-city of Johannesburg. The paper uses visual and spatial analyses of graffiti in Maboneng’s development. The research shows the extent to which the Maboneng precinct is branded through urban aesthetics, including graffiti, and demonstrates that graffiti contributes to placemaking by creating meaningful or identifiable spaces. The analysis reveals graffiti’s aesthetic value in the urban environment: it signifies the redevelopment of Maboneng, distinguishes the area at a local level from surrounding spaces, and also projects a global aesthetic. Using this case study of Maboneng we hope to show how graffiti is leveraged in nurturing urban development, creative economies and tourism in the inner-city. The Occasional Paper is comprised of two parts. The first half of the paper aims to understand the role of graffiti in its urban context. A first section examines the history of graffiti, considering centuries-old traditions of markings on walls, the intersection of graffiti with the birth of hip hop culture and, in the South African context, the role of graffiti in anti-apartheid protest politics. A further section explores the spectrum of graffiti aesthetics, from text-based expressions to the murals of street art. A third section traces graffiti’s complicated relationship to the urban environment, with changing perceptions of graffiti: as vandalism, or a mode of urban dialogue, or a form of outdoor gallery. The sections in this first half of the paper explore the transitions graffiti has made over time and highlight the fluid nature of graffiti, both in space and in the way that it is conceived. They illustrate how graffiti, once perceived as synonymous with urban blight and decay, vandalism and crime, has over time gained a more legitimate social status, for example through commissioned murals or the work of famed international artists, in the process raising the question of who decides the aesthetic of the urban environment and who has a right to participate in the production of urban space. In the second half of the paper, we focus on a case study of Maboneng, in the City of Johannesburg. Maboneng is an area of redevelopment in Johannesburg’s inner city, established in 2009. The neighbourhood has transformed through investment in the public environment and the upgrading of dozens of buildings with a focus on the creative economy. Graffiti and street art are prevalent in the area and have contributed to the branding of the area as a creative space. Through a photographic essay and mapping, we analyse the spatial and visual elements of graffiti in Maboneng, exploring its various contradictions, themes, surfaces, and the media used to create it. The detailed mapping examines different types of graffiti, and their locality, density, scale and visibility. The case study shows, in detail, the relationship between graffiti and the local urban environment, but also how graffiti relates to larger processes of urban and economic development in the city.