New Creative Artist

Choose to be creative! Artist and teacher Nita Leland believes that creativity lives in everyone, from the novice artist to the professional. Develop and strengthen your natural curiosity, flexibility, independence and playfulness, and become the artist you want to be. Inside this updated and expanded edition of Nita's bestselling The Creative Artist are over 110 fun activities to exercise your creative muscle:

• Explore what drives you by creating an autobiographical collage
• Jot down ideas for projects and techniques and place them in a jar for random retrieval when you need a jumpstart
• Target dull" subjects and find ways to make them interesting
• Push your creative boundaries by trying new methods and media: paper crafts, Japanese brush painting, creative quilting, inventive photography, grown-up finger painting, monotype and more

This updated version of The Creative Artist breathes new life into a popular North Light classic, helping artists reach greater levels of creativity, inspiration and artistic fulfillment. Perfect for fans of the original—and anyone who wants to be more creative—this book includes:

* A fresh, eye-catching design that showcases 50 percent new material

* New instruction to address the creative challenges of today's artist

* More than 60 fun, fabulous activities for achieving greater creativity

* Artwork in a wide variety of styles and mediums

Practical advice combined with inspiring exercises and insights from other artists make this the ultimate creativity guide!

Daniel Lombardo - Library Journal

As Sidaway has published more than 25 successful art books, any new book of his is worth a look. Here, he nearly pulls off what the title promises. Claims that these really are "all the techniques" an oil painter will need and that a "complete beginner" can learn oil painting in only ten steps are hyperbolic at best. However, Sidaway does give us a quick and broad survey of the techniques of composition, tonal underpainting, glazing, impasto, and the like. The true beginner would need a foundation in drawing before making good use of this book, and readers may want to go on to explore other techniques in oil, such as those in George Deem's How To Paint a Vermeer: A Painter's History of Art.