Creativity has long been thought of as a personal trait, a gift bestowed on some and unachievable by others. While we laud the products of creativity, the stories behind them are often abridged to the elusive "aha!" moment, the result of a momentary stroke of genius. In The Craft of Creativity Matthew A. Cronin and Jeffrey Loewenstein present a new way to understand how we innovate. They emphasize the importance of the journey and reveal the limitations of focusing on outcomes. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship, their own research, and interviews with professionals and learners who employ creativity in the arts, engineering, business, and more, Cronin and Loewenstein argue that creativity is a cognitive process that hinges on changing one's perspective. It's a skill that anyone can hone, and one that benefits from thinking with others and over time. Breaking new ground in the discussion about how we innovate, this book provides strategies that everyone can use to be more creative.

Do you want to be more creative in less time? Have better ideas and then know which ones to run with? Hegarty's book, Work of Art, shares 5 steps he discovered that can help anyone be more creative and make their ideas happen faster. Work of Art is about the craft of creativity - the work process - that turns great ideas into something awesome and real-world.

In The Artisan Soul, Erwin Raphael McManus, author, thought leader, and founder of MOSAIC in Los Angeles, pens a manifesto for human creativity and the beginning of a new renaissance. McManus not only calls us to reclaim our creative essence but reveals how we can craft our lives into a work of art. There are no shortcuts to quality, and McManus celebrates the spiritual process that can help us discover our true selves. McManus demonstrates that we all carry within us the essence of an artist. We all need to create, to be a part of a process that brings to the world something beautiful, good, and true, in order to allow our souls to come to life. It's not only the quality of the ingredients we use to build our lives that matter, but the care we bring to the process itself. Just like baking artisan bread, it's a process that's crafted over time. And God has something to say about how we craft our lives. With poignant, inspirational stories and insights from art, life, history, and scripture interspersed throughout, McManus walks readers through the process of crafting a life of beauty and wonder.

Innovative approach to bookbinding explains techniques that elevate handmade books into extraordinary artworks. Simple, well-illustrated directions explain how to make pop-up panels, pages that "explode" from the spine, slipcases, and more.

For more than thirty years Natalie Goldberg has been challenging and cheering on writers with her books and workshops. In her groundbreaking first book, she brings together Zen meditation and writing in a new way. Writing practice, as she calls it, is no different from other forms of Zen practice—"it is backed by two thousand years of studying the mind." This thirtieth-anniversary edition includes new forewords by Julia Cameron and Bill Addison. It also includes a new preface in which Goldberg reflects on the enduring quality of the teachings here. She writes, "What have I learned about writing over these thirty years? I’ve written fourteen books, and it’s the practice here in Bones that is the foundation, sustaining and building my writing voice, that keeps me honest, teaches me how to endure the hard times and how to drop below discursive thinking, to taste the real meat of our minds and the life around us."

In this collection of nine essays some of the preeminent art historians in the United States consider the relationship between art and craft, between the creative idea and its realization, in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. The essays, all previously unpublished, are devoted to the pictorial arts and are accompanied by nearly 150 illustrations. Examining works by such artists as Michelangelo, Titian, Volterrano, Giovanni di Paolo, and Annibale Carracci (along with aspects of the artists' creative processes, work habits, and aesthetic convictions), the essayists explore the ways in which art was conceived and produced at a time when collaboration with pupils, assistants, or independent masters was an accepted part of the artistic process. The consensus of the contributors amounts to a revision, or at least a qualification, of Bernard Berenson's interpretation of the emergent Renaissance ideal of individual "genius" as a measure of original artistic achievement: we must accord greater influence to the collaborative, appropriative conventions and practices of the craft workshop, which persisted into and beyond the Renaissance from its origins in the Middle Ages. Consequently, we must acknowledge the sometimes rather ordinary beginnings of some of the world's great works of art--an admission, say the contributors, that will open new avenues of study and enhance our understanding of the complex connections between invention and execution. With one exception, these essays were delivered as lectures in conjunction with the exhibition The Artists and Artisans of Florence: Works from the Horne Museum hosted by the Georgia Museum of Art in the fall of 1992.