Illustration Books

El producto que recibi fue tal y como lo describe el vendedor, ademas lo recibi antes de la fecha prevista, la calidad del libro es excelente, quede completamente complacido con esta compra.

This is a really good way to teach your kids about the bible. No sabia como empezar con mi hija de 4 anos y decidi comprar este libro y estoy encantada. Los cuadros son lindos e inspirantes para mi hija que esta desesperada cada noche para que le lea las historias. Ni siquiera tengo que hacer preguntas, porque las preguntas vienen incluidas en la redaccion y mi hija las responde inmediatamente. Al mismo tiempo cada historia -relatada en lenguaje sencillo para ninos- tiene al final una oracion relacionada y que les ensena a orar con palabras faciles. It's just great!. I really recommend it!.

This was a great book. It has a short story accompanied by a picture, questions and a prayer. It also had the scripture listed it was taken from so that one could look up the story in the Bible. The pictures helped English speakers know which story was which.

When I was little girl, one of the first books that I started reading was this book. This book includes stories from the Old and New Testament and it is explained using simple sentences and beautiful illustrations. At the end of each story it has questions so the child could test him or herself reading comprehension. I lost this book. Now that I have a child of my own one of the first things that I did was to get this book. My child is still too young to understand it but I am reading a story every night knowing that one day she will start reading it on her own like aI did. This is a book that every Spanish speaking child should have in their bookhelf.

This is one of the most gorgeous books you'll come across--every aspect is beautifully thought out. The bird paintings by the Gentlings are breathtaking--and often offer a little sly humor in their composition. Treat yourself or another bird lover.

When Of Birds and Texas was first published in 1986 it was quickly deemed the most magnificent book in the history of Texas publishing. Consisting of 40 exquisitely detailed bird portraits and ten Texas landscape scenes, the volume was enhanced with accompanying commentary by the Gentling brothers and a personal essay by John Graves.

Yet the 23" by 29 ½" outsize folio which weighed 46 pounds was beyond the reach and shelf space of many. Thus, it was printed as a limited edition. Now, for the first time, this unparalleled volume is available to a mass audience at an affordable price and manageable size while retaining the original 50 color plates as well as 28 remarques. Retaining the integrity of the original folio, this is truly a work of estimable quality and a collector's item.

In addition, the recent edition offers a new essay by Stuart Gentling, "Of Birds and Texas, Audubon and Us," in which he relates how the brothers' profound respect for the famed ornithologist/artist paved the way for them to create this book, which is inspired by Audubon's work.

The Gentlings are twin brothers, artists, authors, and lecturers based in Fort Worth. Having discovered at an early age the print edition of John James Audubon's Birds of America, they now share a passion for art, world culture and wildlife.

His keen interest in wildlife, particularly birds, led Stuart to learn taxidermy. Both brothers began a serious study of art when they were 14. Their awards are numerous; their paintings may be found in museums and libraries throughout Texas and the United States. This year Scott received a commission to paint a portrait of President George Bush for the Texas State Capitol dome.

Artwork in Of Birds and Texas is created collaboratively by the Gentlings. In the original folio are reproductions of watercolor paintings with the color, blend and atmosphere attributed to Stuart, while the line and small strokes were contributed by Scott.

Getting the first volume published proved to be a formidable task. Plans reached a standstill when it was discovered that the actual production of the folio would cost more than double the estimates. What rescued the project was a lucky find by Stuart in the Philadelphia Print Shop catalog: a listing of Audubon's "The Great Crow Blackbird." The brothers were able to purchase the Audubon for $18,000. After its authentication as an original Audubon, it was sold at Sotheby's for $253,000. Thus, the completion of the original Of Birds and Texas was made possible.

Our loss would be great had this not been so. More than just a work of incredible visual beauty Of Birds and Texas is a joy to read as each color plate is partnered with a bird tale by the Gentlings.

A treasure in itself, the essay by beloved Texas author John Graves is as gracefully written as the classic works for which he is known, From A Limestone Ledge: Some Essays and Other Ruminations About Country Life In Texas, and Goodbye To A River. Once again, Mr. Graves writes with trenchant luminosity.

This landmark volume is dedicated to John James Audubon. It is now recreated for all to enjoy.

- Gail Cooke

This book has received an Award of Excellence from the 2001 Southern Books Competition. "You could not find a lovelier title page spread than that in Of Birds and Texas. The sensitive calligraphy and the well-designed two-column text pages support the stunning bird prints." Congratulations to the authors, designer Ellen McKie and the University of Texas Press.

I had the pleasure of travelling in Bhutan with my father for 4 months when he was painting some of the work in the book. Shameless plug here for him, I know, but the designer did a wonderful job and the content ain't half bad either. Cheers!

I had the pleasure of travelling in Bhutan with my father for 4 months when he was painting some of the work in the book. Shameless plug here for him, I know, but the designer did a wonderful job and the content ain't half bad either. Cheers!

A Painter's Year In The Forests Of Bhutan by scholar and painter A. K. Hellum is an impressively presented artbook offering unique botanical and visual insights into the flora and culture of the land of Bhutan. Featuring color illustrations of more than 100 rarely seen Bhutanese plants, Hellum's extensive and thoughtful commentary enhances the gentle, museum quality illustrations, and provides the reader with a thoughtful perspective in the form of an exotic giftbook which is most especially recommended for lovers of nature and students of botany.

This book is very helpful, especially as a reference for anyone learning botanical illustration or anyone wanting to learn about specific botanical artists.

It's beautiful art work also makes it very nice as a "coffee table" book for others to admire.

This is an excellent collection of botanical illustrations reproduced in very detailed, rich color on quality paper. Artists from all over the world are represented with brief biographies of each one. I think this book is one of the best books to have if you love botanical illustration and would like to see examples done by highly skilled, scientifically accurate illustrators. Just as good or better than the first Shirley Sherwood collection book.

As a rank beginner in watercolor and pen and ink I much appreciate the effort it takes to produce great illustrations of natural objects. Shirley Sherwood has brought together her remarkable collection of modern botanical paintings (and some ink renderings) in "A Passion for Plants: Contemporary Botanical Masterworks" and made them accessible to the public. It is certainly an impressive effort.

Unlike many styles of illustration, botanical art usually involved a finely detailed painting on a white background, occasionally with additional smaller drawings or paintings. Occasionally a background is also provided, but most have no background. The renditions of just about every artist featured are extremely well done and it is hard to pick a favorite. Kate Nessler's watercolor of Rose Hips & Oak Leaves, Mariko Imai's exquisite watercolors of carnivorous plants, Elizabeth Dowle's paintings of fruit, Francesca Anderson's detailed ink renditions of sunflowers and cacti, and John Wilkinson's ultra realistic (complete with insect damage and hover flies!) watercolor of Ligularia, are just a few of the treats in this magnificent book. It sure makes for a tough standard, but a worthy one, for us beginners!

A great book for artists, botanists and anyone interested in plant illustration!

I picked this up because of the book's physical beauty, but I've just read it in one sitting, couldn't put it down--a fascinating window into 20th-century British cultural history as well as book design.

What a loving tribute to Allen Lane, the visionary who founded Penguin Books in 1935. Few publishers have consistently put their best `face' forward year after year over thousands of titles and I find it surprising that this Penguin cover history hasn't been written before 2005.

Admittedly most of their covers until the Fifties, though distinctive in the three-tier horizontal design, were not that creative but things slowly changed no doubt because of market pressure from other paperback publishers. I thought Penguin covers really took of in 1962 with the use of Romek Marber's simple cover grid. Pages 104-5 in the book show eighteen brilliant covers using simple graphics with black, green and red inks. The grid cover style ran into the seventies with the non-fiction Pelicans and nicely still using everybody's favorite type: Helvetica.

Author Phil Baines has done a lot of research for the book though it is basically visual with excellent short text pieces for the various title genres. A nice touch is spread of forty-eight Penguin logos from 1935 to 2005 at the back of the book and it is this kind of editorial thoughtfulness that makes the book so interesting.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

Hi from Barcelona.
First of all, sorry for my really bad english.
I really recomend the purchase in Amazon.
No problem whit anything, all is perfect.
I think that the book of Phil Baines (Penguin by Design) is one of the obligated purchases for any graphic designer. Perfect design and perfect information.
Thanks Phil!!!

Marc

A gorgeous and effortless read showcasing interesting and varied children's book illustrators from around the world. The layout is simple and clean, with biographical info about each illustrator and then three pages of their work (or in some cases, five pages). Despite a pithy (but short) introduction, this is far from an academic text. It will, however, get you thinking about the nature of illustration for children's books and may spur you onto further reading or research. Plus the visual stimulation is inspiring!

Beautifully illustrated, with several examples of each artist studied, this book is packed with original works. Biographical information of the artists is included. Very interesting, diverse and often whimsical, the book is well designed to introduce contemporary children's book illustration.

In the Introduction, Martin Salisbury has an important quote from Walter Herdeg that pinpoints why it's so important to expose children to good art: 'The smallest owner of books has his special, private art gallery and a unique relationship to it, for he pores over his favourites endlessly, staring at them with a fascination that guarantees indelible memories of scenes and subjects - French, Swedish, Swiss, English, and many others.'

The book offers a varied selection of the best of contemporary children's illustrators from around the world, including Mexico, China and Iran, as well as the more accessible Western artists. There is some biographical information about each artist, and a selection of beautifully reprinted illustrations. In addition, we get a few quotes from the artists themselves where they talk about their inspiration and their style.

I was surprised to learn how many work entirely in the digital medium, even though you couldn't tell the difference from looking at their output.

Less surprising was the note about the more cautious and politically correct approach to illustration that American publishers have, versus, for example, their Italian counterparts, who are much more open to experimental work that is not necessarily obviously aimed at an audience of children.

The ideas and concepts in this book are wonderful. When I am not looking at it for inspiration, I am looking at just for sheer enjoyment.

A book that no designer should be without. A lasting source of inspiration.

Here's how to start a studio, publicize it, become a superstar, and change the world: (1) From birth, draw like a Renaissance angel. (2) Be one of 15 percent of applicants selected to attend New York's Cooper Union. (3) Get fired from your first job, or hate it and quit. (4) Surround yourself with like-minded, equally talented partners. (5) Follow your heart, put forth your ideas, be fearless. (6) In a grid-locked Modernist era, produce fanciful, hand-drawn work. (7) Keep doing it for 50 years. Over 25 of those years, distribute 86 issues of a self-promotional publication that still continues to inspire.

For a quarter-century, members of Push Pin Studio used every art technique -- woodcut, charcoal, watercolor, collage, pen-and-ink, color adhesive film -- to interpret subjects including Good and Evil, Black and White, and Teens and Bikers. Topics ranged from the serious ("Violence and the American Dream") to the silly ("The Mouth").

Milton Glaser has been known to say that nobody draws any more. This book, which features at least one cover and spread from each issue -- many tattered and yellowing -- may spawn a revival of the artist's hand as a design tool, and a revival of the one-color job. The first 30 or so issues of the Graphic, with a couple of virtuoso two- and three-color exceptions, are a lesson in how to do brilliant work in black on newsprint. Contrast is the designer's best friend and weapon: white space against black, tiny against huge, curlicue against justified column of type. Wit is a powerful tool, too.

A head-and-shoulders portrait of a large barnyard rooster graces the book's cover. Thickly outlined on benday-dotted background, he sports a tuxedo shirt, bow-tie, monocle, dotted beak, and bright red wattle. I'd like to think that the mascot choice has more to do with the concept of "something to crow about" than being fearful-or cuckolded. In a phone interview, Seymour Chwast set me straight by listing the bird's qualities: authoritative, prolific, sophisticated, and on-time. Ah-ha, the real meaning is "the early bird meets the deadline," with a few grains of self-mockery thrown in.

If Push Pin did not singlehandedly transform mainstream culture, as Steven Heller suggests in the introduction, it had a symbiotic relationship with it. Push Pin took from everything around them: from the Victorian, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco, from old signboards and newspapers, American primitives and wood-type specimens, from current art and music, fashion and advertising. The faces in Chwast's "Dante's Inferno" poster of 1967 echo Richard Avendon's solarized Beatles portraits. The Beatles' 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine -- and the rainbows-and-butterflies trend in animation that ensued -- owed its aesthetic to Push Pin. It will take a more diligent researcher than I to ascertain whether the color and line that burst through in the Push Pin Graphic issue 52 (and morphed into Chwast's signature style) was inspired by psychedelic rock posters, or whether the Push Pin style reached San Francisco concert promoters first.

Content aside, the Push Pin Graphic is a book well worth examining for its own design: the hefty squarish format, sense of scale and pacing, fine color and black- and-white printing on uncoated stock. The details also merit pleasurable study: old-fashioned typefaces like Cheltenham and Stymie set in old-fashioned ways like centered and flush-left-and-right; even the placement of the folios on the page. Just as the subject matter of each issue of the Push Pin Graphic mirrored goings-on in the world, the design and pacing of the book mirror the issues being featured. As the Graphic became more eclectic and colorful and began to function as self-promotion for a larger group of artists, the pages of the book become more patterned and colorful. Martin Venezky has honored the Push Pin style while designing a book that's 100 percent up-to-date.

This book may be a walk down memory lane, but it's far from an epitaph. Glaser, 75, now working on posters, books, a museum exhibition, and performance art with a political bent, recently said, "Retiring is for people who fundamentally hate what they do." Chwast, 73, added, "Every era had its doubts, but we kept going. The culture -- music, posters, films, kept rubbing off on us, and we keep reinventing it and rubbing it back on them."

If the Push Pin conviction, zest, and humor rubs off on today's readers -- and if some of them decide to shut down their computers and digital cameras for a little while and pick up a brush or pen and ink -- this book will be a great success.

This review should be taken seriously considering I didn't really like "The Rape of the Lock" and still give this book 5 stars!

"History is not a vacuum," one of my university history professors always told us. Neither is literature for that matter! This book examines the mock-epic poem "Rape of the Lock" in its social, literary, and historical contexts. The poem takes up a small portion of the book, and the rest is made up of diary entries, letters, essays, newspapers, etc. that help to explain the culture surrounding Pope. The city of London, clothes, card games, coffee, makeup, social norms, and countless other things are discussed in very readable and enjoyable ways in order to make "The Rape of the Lock" truly come alive.

This poem serves two purposes. First, Pope wrote it in response to an upper-class quarrel over an event at a party in which a young girl had her hair cut. The incident itself was petty and stupid, but the families of the parties involved were taking it very seriously. Pope, then, wrote this poem in epic form (the most grand of poetic forms) to show the absurdity of the matter, and thus reconcile the offender and offended.

That is the first function of this poem. Even though the incident is long forgotten, the poem is still very funny. But there is a greater purpose to this poem--it was written like an epic. It contains several epic elements--an epic battle (at the card game), the invocation of muses and gods, the epic quest (to cut the hair), and several literary devices, such as epic-length similes and catalogs. This is what makes this poem so great, and what serves as a testimony to Pope's remarkable genius for wit and satire.

Pope was, in my opinion, one of the greatest English poets, certainly the greatest satirist. This is one of his greatest works, and it is short enough to read over and over again without investing too much time.

This is a highly intelligent book on one of the finest poems by the eighteenth century's most celebrated poet. Brilliantly written with wit, style, and a flair for interesting detail, Wall's book includes textual information and a wealth of carefully selected secondary material that makes this "one-stop shopping" for anyone interested in the work or indeed in the period. Because of its combination of lively writing and scholarly erudition, I would recommend Wall's book for a wide variety of interest and knowledge levels. Wonderful Bedford series idea and terrific book.

If you have an interest in this art-form then you want to do it the way it has been done for hundreds of years. This little book shows you the way of the masters down through the centuries. To recreate the beauty that has been held timeless in illuminated manuscripts, thus adding to it's number, is a fine thing thing to accomplish in a lifetime.

As a practicing medieval illuminator and historical bookbinder, I can recommend wholeheartedly Ms. Grafe's fantastic book on gilding. The book is well written and contains many valuable illustrations to accompany somewhat complicated procedures. I especially appreciate the easy to follow, clear, detailed steps for the gesso gilding process which is very time consuming (but worth every minute) and its success depends on many factors which can be a challenge to someone just starting. She gives the tips and pointers that only an experienced gilder could pass on to help with the environmental influences and other things which can stifle success. It is an excellent resource material for anyone who is fascinated in book arts but especially useful for someone who wants to improve and perfect their technique in gilding paper and parchment.

Secreta is easy to understand, well organized, and has a lot of excellent drawings and photographs of the steps involved in gilding. It also has some historical background on how gilding was used, as well as a nice little section on using the paint pigments that would have accompanied the gilding on medieval manuscripts. One of the few how-to books that I've read cover to cover, and have recommended to my friends who already do gilding or are interested in learning.

Heather Gray

Like all of Neville's writings, this book is superb. All of his work continues to reveal so much to me as I continue to read his stuff over and over again. This book expanded my consciousness on "The Scale Of Being," as he refers to it; here he goes into detail about how most people get stuck on the "what" happened level of things in life, and while others on the "how" things happened, and finally others whose consciousness is broader realize the "why" in the things that happen in their lives and therefore are able to execute their destination in profound and creative ways. This book inspired my poem "Tomorrow Never Happens so I plant for today creating my own harvest in the faith of one day, relinquishing tomorrow's future for another day."

I've read over 100 books in this area of study and Neville's works are at the top of my recommendation as he has impressed me as only a few others have. Seedtime and Harvest opens up with the collosal statement that the Bible is written in the lauguage of symbolism and that all of its characters are personifications of the laws and functions of Mind and that the Bible is psychology rather than history. Neville is attempting to get us to see this work from his, enlightened, perspective.
He also gives us a good breakdown of his version of conscious creation with the roles of Producer, Director, Author and Actor.
Neville also has a great chapter on Faith and gives some substance to the the search for meaning.
There are currently 6 bound Neville books available and I have found 3 on the web that are not. They all have been consistently inspired.

Aldous Huxley was once asked what books he would choose to take with him if he was marooned on a deserted island. Huxley said: "The Manual of Zen Buddhism and a manual on boat building." If I found myself alone on that island, I would need only what I have absorbed from this book. It has been 12 years or more since I first found Seedtime and Harvest. I spent 3 years in a Western spiritual path, have studied Eastern and Western teachings, and so I recognized Truth in this book. Using the simple technique that Neville delineates with great clarity, I have manifested my co-op apartment, jobs which utilized all my training, and some good stuff for other people, too. If you have some understanding of the power of thought and want to change your life, this is absolutely the best gift you can give yourself. I gave my copy away long ago, but if I ever get stuck on that island, I Know that it might take time, but using what I have learned from Neville, I have no doubt, that a plane or fishing boat or Something would show up and take me safely home.