Caldecott Medalist Allen Say presents a stunning graphic novel chronicling his journey as an artist during WWII, when he apprenticed under Noro Shinpei, Japan's premier cartoonist DRAWING FROM MEMORY is Allen Say's own story of his path to becoming the renowned artist he is today. Shunned by his father, who didn't understand his son's artistic leanings, Allen was embraced by Noro Shinpei, Japan's leading cartoonist and the man he came to love as his "spiritual father." As WWII raged, Allen was further inspired to consider questions of his own heritage and the motivations of those around him. He worked hard in rigorous drawing classes, studied, trained--and ultimately came to understand who he really is. Part memoir, part graphic novel, part narrative history, DRAWING FROM MEMORY presents a complex look at the real-life relationship between a mentor and his student. With watercolor paintings, original cartoons, vintage photographs, and maps, Allen Say has created a book that will inspire the artist in all of us.

Edmund White’s charming, funny, telling series of vignettes of the Paris neighborhood where he and his lover, French architect and illustrator Hubert Sorin, lived. In this ode to Pairs, the everyday becomes extraordinary with White’s observations accompanied by Sorin’s illustrations. With characters like Father Pierre Riches, the “kind and elegant” catholic priest whose hair had been stroked by Cavafy, to Billy Boy, the jewelry designer with 16,000 Barbies, there is delightful eccentricity to this collaboration. Written during Sorin’s decline to AIDS, Our Paris is a poignant look at the couple and the city they loved.

From the Introduction: If you think about it, all life drawing and painting is at some point being done from the artist's memory, even if that memory is only a few seconds old. Every time the artist takes their eyes off of the model or scene and looks at their paper or canvas, their visual memory is involved. What if that artist's visual memory was highly trained? That artist might need the model for a shorter period of time, or she might have a more productive time when the model is in pose. He might be better at painting all of the fleeting effects that nature throws at us when we are landscape painting en plein air. Although I encourage you to consistently engage in memory-drawing practice, it should not supplant your regular art exercises. Memory-drawing ought to be done in addition to your regular art training, not instead of it. In a perfect world it would be integrated into traditional arts instruction, but the reality is that you will most likely be training your visual memory on your own. Memory Drawing: Perceptual Training and Recall exists to guide you in doing just that. It will also help you improve your abilities to remember fleeting effects, seize essentials, and even enhance your imagination.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Sketches from Memory (From "Mosses from an Old Manse")" by Nathaniel Hawthorne. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

In 1952 and 1953 as he wandered around America, Jack Kerouac jotted down spontaneous prose poems, or "sketches" as he called them, on small notebooks that he kept in his shirt pockets. The poems recount his travels—New York, North Carolina, Lowell (Massachusetts, Kerouac’s birthplace), San Francisco, Denver, Kansas, Mexico—observations, and meditations on art and life. The poems are often strung together so that over the course of several of them, a little story—or travelogue—appears, complete in itself. Published for the first time, Book of Sketches offers a luminous, intimate, and transcendental glimpse of one of the most original voices of the twentieth century at a key time in his literary and spiritual development.

Presents a set of basic exercises designed to release creative potential and tap into the special abilities of the brain's right hemisphere.

A Sky Longing for Memories is a Makoto Shinkai fan's dream! Featuring art created by the beloved director, this full-color art book is packed with art from the many movies he directed for Studio CoMix Wave. The book is a 175 page LANDSCAPE FORMAT softcover, the majority of which are images, a rare treat in the realm of fanbooks. Inside you will find hundreds of backgrounds from from his award-winning works: 5 Centimeters per Second, The Place Promised in Our Early Days, Voices of a Distant Star, and a TV advertisement for the Mainichi Newspaper. In addition to the backgrounds, there is a section about the software and technique behind CoMix Wave's animation, which discuss the key features of the software the studio has developed to use at various stages of production. The English edition also comes with a lengthy interview with Mr. Shinkai and other key members of his studio.