Schools and Instruction Books

I attended Juilliard for one year and all I can say about this book is that every word is true. I enjoyed the book and would recommend it as a primer for any young person contemplating auditioning for Juilliard. It is not a place for the faint hearted.

This is NOT the best written book I've read. The style is actually a bit trite and tired. However, the information in this book is very informative and interesting. I think this book is essential reading for anyone interested in going to Juilliard, either for a degree or as part of their pre-college division. It's also a great read for people just interested in learning the "behind the scenes" of the school.

This description of life at one of the world's most famous music schools is remarkably accurate. The author explores the good and the bad, the wonderfully exciting and the surprisingly mundane, from entrance auditions to graduation juries. A great choice for those who really wish to know what Juilliard is like.

The school of Pennsylvania Impressionists' inventive approach to painting, in my opinion, gave way to an innovative American art movement. Their powerfully loose, fluid brush strokes and eye-catching palettes fashioned a refreshing artistic outlook that has spanned many generations. Thus proving "less is more".
This hardcover book captures each artist (including such noteworthy names as Garber, Redfield and Spencer to name a few) and outlines his history of work. The Pennsylvania Impressionists contains a wealth of art knowledge. From newcomers to P.I. enthusiasts, all will enjoy this immensely. An enjoyable read with attractive imagery. The author should be commended on writing such a thorough piece.

I had high hopes for this book in that it would offer full-color plates of some of the most beautiful American art, that of Pennsylvania impressionists. I was sorely disappointed and returned the book immediately. Why would anyone who appreciates such fine art want such a reference book that is mostly black and white plates that do not do the artwork justice?

Thomas Folk's book is possibly the only one of its kind. Well-researched, well-organized, well done! Of this subject, Folk must be the most knowledgable person today. If you want to share his knowledge on one of the most "American" art movements ever, read this book!

This a beautifully illustrated book that can introduce you to the major Russian painters. And--if you're like me--all of them before the early 20th century will be unknown to you. I've read a fair amount of the text. I've found it good background for someone who just wants to know a little about Russian art before visiting Moscow and St Petersburg. There are good plates of the most important paintings. It's easy to go online to find more biographical background and even more plates if you find artists that intrigue you. I wish the index were better. The book is organized by genres--portraits, historical paintings, landscapes, etc. If you're trying to find all the paintings--or commentary--on a single painter, it's a struggle. But that's a quibble. I'm very pleased with the book. It's useful as I'm doing background research for my trip. I'll love having it as a reference once I return.

the only reason to have this book is the images - huge and very high res, and the array itself is quite fascinating. however, if you read the text, your impression may be spoiled. I don't know if Mr. Leek has a PhD in Art History and whether he ever researched Russian art and history before; right there in the introduction the author (Mr.Leek) states that in 1913 the Romanov's celebrated the MILLENNIUM of their rule! Once I encounter nonsense of such sort, I will never treat the text under review as a trustworthy source and its author an expert. However, for such a low price I would buy this book just for the pics!

This book is certainly worth having in any collection of students of Russian art. While it is not terribly useful for any particular period and is a bit short on detailed information, it does accomplish the main purpose of having an overview of the various types and historical periods of Russian art. It has an excellent collection of color plates which speak for themselves and exhibit the various traditions. It has a very short section on post revolutionary Russian Impressionism and I found that useful, but for others who want an indepth look at any particular period or genre, it is pretty basic. Worth having for historical and tradition context, but for serious focus on a particular tradition, other books are more detailed. I'm happy I have it.

Patricia's approach with children is sensitive and perceptive. I found this book personally helpful with children in my studio. Ms. Campbell's approach encouraged me to ask my students questions and I was pleasantly surprised by their honest and passionate ideas about music. I changed my program in response to their ideas. I appreciated that Patricia interviewed students of different abilities not just elite performers. The main idea is that they all had a meaningful connection to their music-making activities.

I read this book for a music education class. The book is divided into three sections. The first section describes scenes the author witnessed in various schools; the second section describes one-on-one interviews with children about music; the third section makes recommendations for music teachers based on her ethnographic observations of children. The third section has some compelling ideas in it, and the first two sections support her ideas there. However, if I hadn't been required to read it, I wouldn't have gotten through the first two sections in order to benefit from the third.

I agree with an earlier review - check it out from library rather than investing in the book yourself.

I enjoyed this discussion of children's natural bent for improvisation. However, this isn't the kind of book you refer back to a lot later on. I would suggest getting it through your local University library.

By the way, if you are a University librarian and your school has a music education department, you should definitely get this book!

Now in a newly expanded and updated second edition, "Windows On Learning: Documenting Young Children's Work" is the collaborative work of educational consultant Judy Harris Helm, educational resource specialist Sallee Beneke, and classroom teacher Kathy Steinheimer (Valseka Hinton Early Childhood Education Center). "Windows On Learning" provides teachers with a proven method for collecting, analyzing and displaying children's work at school. Instructions are provided that will easily enable principles, curriculum coordinators, and Head Start personnel how to develop children's portfolios to share with parents or for assessing children's academic performance. Replete with examples, illustrations, and basic information on incorporating standards into documentation, "Windows On Learning" also discusses how to analyze and talk about documentation in professional learning communities and teams. There is even cogent information on preparing teacher portfolios. Of special note is the "Movie Theater Project, a literacy-rich project from an inner-city pre-kindergarten classroom. "Windows On Learning" is strongly recommended as a resource for any educator involved with documenting the academic and classroom performance of children preschool through second grade.

This book is a very useful tool for learning different types of documenting techniques. There are pictures, graphs and examples of documenting a child's work. It's worth buying if you are going to be working in a classroom!

Not a very good tool unless you have other supporting data to aid with this book. Nothing new. Not worth it.

Bert Geer Phillips and the Taos Art Colony provides a comprehensive examination of the life and work of Taos art colony founder Bert Phillips within the larger context of late 19th and early 20th century American art. The book is comprised of a series of thematic essays by two preeminent Southwest art historians, Julie Schimmel and Robert R. White. The book is richly illustrated and meticulously documented, and includes valuable apendices including Phillips' exhibition records, a complete catalogue of known works, letters and essays by Phillips. An indispensible book for any student of the Taos Society of Artists and the history of the Taos art colony.

Bert Geer Phillips is my great grandfather. I anticipated and waited for this book to be published for a very long time. I know that Phillips estranged son and his wife financed this particular piece of work. My only memory of Ralph in Taos was at my Grandmothers funeral when he came to inventory the paintings that were being left to my father. This book is a very limited and rather clinical look at an extraordinary artist. The book reads more as a tribute to Bert Phillips son Ralph. Ralph was not an artist nor did he spend any of his adult years in Taos. When Mr. Phillips visited San Diego (his sons home) he stayed in a hotel near Balboa Park. His paintings hang in Anthonys Seafood Restaurant a favorite of Mr. Phillips. This book contains very little personal insight nor in depth historical facts of Phillips life. Often is reads more like a technical locator for the existing Phillips works. Mention of Phillips daughter Margo and her Son are nowhere to be found. These were the individuals who truly knew Bert Geer Phillips. Better books are available. None of the other books pertaining to Phillips were comissioned by members of his family.

If you are a die-hard fan of Coupland, this is a must have. The narrative in the book is very, very short, reminiscent of a warm-up for Hey, Nostradamus! or Girlfriend in a Coma. Yet somehow it is very coherent and affecting by the end. The faux-yearbook entry text dispersed throughout is sometimes comedy gold and sometimes very sad and affecting. The overall "theme" of the book is the inconsequentiality, yet monumental drama that is high school life and it is handled very well. The montage of yearbook shots, and their juxtaposition with the text works very well. Also, note that the copy I ordered was the original non-trade paperback edition with the slipcover that is shown on Coupland's site (www.coupland.com). I believe there is a newer, trade edition and this may be the one you get if you order from Amazon UK, although I am not sure. In any case, this is undoubtedly an "art" book and may not be worth the price for someone looking for something more substantial from a literary perspective. However, if you love Coupland's style and want a unique item to add to your collection, this is an excellent little piece.

Very little text, mostly photos from a high school in the 70s,
with yearbook-syle quotes and classmate notes. Extremely short
narrative of a ghost of a student inhabiting schools interspersed.
If you're looking for substantial text from/about Coupland, pass.
If you want a short, nutty post-modern fiction thing, this is it.
Some of the photos are amusing, but most manage
to make the 70s unglamorous and depressing.

I was slightly disappointed when I received this book. There is only one drawing for each character along with a brief description of the character and five steps on how to draw them. The book starts off with an introduction from Cale Tucker (main character). I thought there would be more drawing tips for each character and that it would show how to draw the characters faces, etc., but there's only one pose for each character to draw. The characters featured are Cale, Akima, Korso, Preed, Gune, Cook, Stith, the Drej, and Chief Gaoul. Included also is a guide how to draw each of the spaceships. There's also some graph paper in the back to draw the characters on, which takes up half the book. I recommend this book to Titan A.E. fans, but it would have been nice to see some more poses and tips to draw from.

This is a good book if all you want is to draw each charecter in a single pose, but not anyhting more then that. It has onlt one picture of each charecter. The drawing method isn't even that great. It uses grids, and grids are useless if you want to truely learn how to DRAW the character from memory. When you use the traditional ball-and-line method (which real animators use), you learn how to "see" your drawing in verious dimentions which allows you to draw the charecter in different poses. It also makes for better remembering as to HOW to draw the character. With the grid-method the book uses, you only see the charecter in one pose, and one dimention. Totally useless if you want to draw from mind. Buy this book if you are simply out to collect merchandise from this great movie, or if you just want the nice pictures (as the pictures of the charecters are actually nice to look at).

It is amazing how different the colors are look and behave. Confused by the labeling PB42 or Hue or ASTM I? Why does the same labelings (i.e. PR108) appear on multiple colors? What do those weird names really represent? It makes for interesting reading - the history, the best, and the worst products. I always wondered why some of my watercolors looked grainy. Not all colors by the best manufacturer rate highly. This book looks like a lifelong effort that will save your experimenting forever to find a good Cadium Red color, a member of one of the 10 major color groupings covered.

Inaccurate information abounds. Tiresome reading. Little good information. Overly expensive...sorry I bought it.

a poor quality book, badly written and full of mistakes. wilcox is clearly a charlaton, he rants on about other paints being poor quality whilst trying to sell you his own.
I do not recomend this book to anyone.
buy it at your peril

If you spend hours or days painting a watercolor picture, you are going to want to use the best possible paints. You won't want to see your painting fade, become blotchy, or otherwise deteriorate due to inferior paint. To prevent just that sort of thing, this reference book attempts to educate you on the pigments used in watercolor paints--their lightfastness especially, but also other qualities. Which pigments will fade or become blotchy over time? Which will stay strong and true? This book does its best to exhaustively answer those questions.

This book has been updated several times. It is due for another update, but since there is no telling when or even if such an update will be produced, it is still so valuable that I highly recommend getting it now before you buy any (more) watercolor paints.

Although I am reading it all the way through (because that's the kind of person I am), this is not a book to be read, but rather referred to. Let's say, for example, that you want to replace a red you've been using. You would turn to the description of the red pigments, glance through to find the pigments that have been rated highly lightfast by the ASTM (American Society for Testing and Measurement) and that have the color quality you want, then you would turn to the paint reference section to see what brands offer a red using the chosen pigment(s). Even if you cannot find a brand that suits you (and you should be able to), armed with the information in this book, you can go shopping with confidence, checking the paint tubes to make sure they have the pigment you want and not some pigment that will fade and ruin your painting.

For that alone, this book is valuable.

Allow me to address some of the comments other reviewers have made. One reviewer commented that the Da Vinci paints are student grade. I disagree. I've tried a number of different brands, and Da Vinci's artist-grade paints are wonderful--buttery, smooth, and a pleasure to use. (I also like many of Windsor & Newton's paints.) Yes, Michael Wilcox contracted with Da Vinci to create his own custom line of paints, but, as he states in the latest edition of this book, he did that many years after the initial editions in which he had already praised and recommended many of Da Vincis's paints. And he doesn't hold back in criticizing many of the Da Vinci student-grade paints, nor does he hold back in praising or criticizing any brand of paint.

I believe that Mr. Wilcox has tried to be as objective as possible, and I also do *not* see any inappropriate pushing of his own line of paints. He has a single very low-key page--at the back of the book!--describing the Michael Wilcox School of Color, which lets you be the judge of whether you want to look into it more. I also haven't seen any advertisements of his line of paints in the book yet, and, as I said, I'm reading it cover to cover. (I'm in the reds at the moment, though, so I could be wrong, but if the remaining pages follow the pattern already established, I don't expect to see any such advertisement in the remaining pages.)

Another reviewer said that this book has out-of-date paints (it does) and *doesn't* reflect reformulations (but it does). Had they read the book (though perhaps they had an older edition), they would have found Mr. Wilcox's reasons for including discontinued paints. He states that some people may have those older paints still in their supplies, and so he wanted to present that information for those people. If you are a watercolor artist, you know how long paints last. I have tubes I purchased ten years ago. I know artists who have tubes they purchased even longer ago. How valuable it is to be able to read what is in those paints, and possibly avoid using something that will, in the end, disappoint!

He also provides information on old formulas, with an arrow pointing to a new entry on the reformulated paint. Again, including information on both the old and new formulations is valuable. If you are an artist with the old formulation in your supplies, you will want to know that (A) it is perhaps unsuitable and (B) there is a better replacement available for it. Yes, it is possible that there have been even further reformulations since the last edition, but each edition has been keeping up with the times, and I fully expect that, should Mr. Wilcox produce another edition, it will be as up-to-date as possible.

The one valid criticism of this book is that it could be better organized and better edited. DEFINITELY. There are missing words, grammatical errors, punctuation errors, dead-end sentences, orphan sentences, sentence fragments, and so on pretty much on every page. The organization of the material could also be better, and more information on both his testing methods and on the ASTM standards would be greatly appreciated. Mr. Wilcox should perhaps be told that there are copy editors he can hire on a contract basis to copy-edit his works and improve them vastly. Better yet, a developmental editor, who will be more expensive but also more valuable, could help with the organization and content as well.

An alphabetical index of at least all the colors would be great too. A professional indexer could create such.

These are the reasons I gave this book four stars instead of five are (A) the age of the book, (B) the errors, and (C) the need to better organize and expand the content, especially the information on testing standards and methods.

However, flaws aside, this is an enormous work, enormously valuable, with clearly hundreds if not thousands of hours of work put into it, and the information shows that effort.

It should also be mentioned that, before Michael Wilcox published the first edition of this book, whether you would get good paints from even some of the major manufacturers was a hit-or-miss proposition. Many non-lightfast pigments were used, and poor quality paints were created, even by the giants. When this book hit the scene, it had a great deal of positive influence on the watercolor manufacturers. Many of them dropped or reformulated their more questionable paints. That in itself tells you the value of the information in this book. Of course, the ASTM had a lot to do with it too, but without this book pointing out the lack of clothes on the emperor, I am not sure how much weight the ASTM standards alone would have had.

If you are a watercolor artist, do yourself the favor of adding this book to your reference library.

This exhaustive (not to be confused with exhausting) research-based volume should be mandatory reading for all those artists interested in giving their customers their utmost quality of paint on works of art sold. So many paints are not light-fast, or are 'fugitive' (absolutely unreliable), or are packaged by the manufacturer as 'new' colors when they are, in fact, only creative blends of basic colors that any artist can create with colors they likely already have. This book, covering many of the watercolor paint producers in the Western world, exposes these flawed paints, but also gives credit where due to the top-notch pigments and their manufacturers. Details of content, health ratings, color-fastness and quality of brush use are easily understood. Fantastic color swatches (before and after exposure to light) are beside each manufacturer's sample. My only complaint is that this is the only edition available (pub. 1991), as the author said it would be updated periodically, which does not yet appear to have happened. There were only a couple of Quinacridone colors 12 years ago at the time of publication, whereas there are many more now.

Ok, Christopher hart is not the best in the manga business. I think this book is more for expanding your horizon of villians, not teaching you how to draw them. I have to admit though, it showed me some things I didn't think of before. It also showed that some of the harder aspects of drawing are not so hard if you break them apart. Three stars.

I'm a manga artist myself. I don't make them, but I do a lot of fan-based art and such.
Anyway, I do a lot of evil characters. Since I've already developed a talent and a style, I just use this to perfect my villains. Books by Hart like the Fantasy one he did (helped me do dragons an' demons better. And I learned how to make gnolls ^_^) helped a lot. As did this one. Only buy if you know what you're doing. Otherwise, How To Draw Manga series is right up your alley.

However unfairly, I believe that it is necessary to be able to draw manga before publishing a book instructing others how to do it.

Unfortunately, the art in this book is very westernised (not to mention ugly) and most of it does not even approach a "manga" style, and threfore is pretty much useless to most aspiring manga artists.

Avoid this book (and all other members of the same series by Chris Hart) at all costs.

I had mixed reviews about this book, but I had to admit the reason why I bought this book was because of the title. Afterall, no one has drawn a book totally dedicated to villians.

First of all, the book starts off by introducing you to drawing villian’s eyes, which is rather helpful since eyes are one of the important aspects when drawing villains. There’re also the “Good” vs “Bad” expressions and some explanations to go along. Then, there’re various types of baddies, from fighter chicks to medieval villains, and not to forget villains such as monsters, demons and aliens.

Unfortunately, there are mostly one or two examples for most villains, which can be rather limiting if you’re trying to draw the same type of villain in a different way. However, I think this is where your imagination will come in. Some of the arts also strike me as rather kiddy (or perhaps, it's meant to be more for children), although some of the full-page color artworks are very nice.

In addition, I’ve also noticed that most of the examples have a certain “American” (instead of Japanese”) style to it. For the serious mangaka-wannabe though, you are better off getting more “technical” and “Japanese-Style” books such as the “How to Draw Manga” Series, but overall, this book will make a nice reference or resource book for people interested drawing American cartoon.

I've been hosting anime drawing workshops at local libraries, and I've always been on the lookout for books I can recommend to kids interested in continuing to draw in the anime and manga styles. So I checked out this book at a library recently with the intention of compiling a new list of drawing books that I would recommend to the people attending the workshops this summer.
This book will not be on that list.
Quite frankly, despite the fact that there are several very talented artists who contributed to this book, it's lousy. Most of the artwork featured is either mediocre or *not* done in the manga style Hart claims the book revolves around; in fact, seeing how Mr. Hart's art numbers among the worst in the book, I'm skeptical as to whether or not he is a credible source regarding non-Western artistry at all. (His Western-style cartooning is really quite good, so I'm rather surprised at his ineptitude in this field, myself.)
As I said, there are some very good pieces in this book as well--they really stand out when you see them--but they simply make for good references, as most of the "step-by-step" diagrams are about four steps long, adding up to a pretty useless instruction method overall. The proposed "villains" in the book, in fact, are rather one-dimensional from a character perspective, but I can understand how it would be far easier to resort to stereotypical black-and-white personalities than to flesh out a really interesting villain (because, well, that wasn't what this book was supposed to be about, so I can't really hold it against him.)
Most, if not all, pictures were colored digitally--something that most people won't have access to--and a number of them were printed with rough and jagged edges as if they had been drawn with the pencil tool in a Photoshop (or even paint. Strangely enough, these rougher works are actually some of the better ones in the book, if I recall correctly.)

Please, if you're interested in drawing in the anime or manga style, find another book. If you're interested in Western comics, check out Hart's other work (or the Marvel/DC instructional books, which are quite good.) But if it's manga style you're looking to learn about...then this is NOT the book for you.