Title: Illustrating Nature
First published: 2004
Description: Illustrating Nature: Right-brain Art in a Left-brain World is the secret doorway to realistic drawing -- open this book and find the kind of instruction that you've always wanted.

Even if nature isn't your all-time hot interest, the bountiful illustrations, generous tips, and step-by-step tutorials focusing on natural objects you can find anywhere, anytime, will give you a jump-start on any other type of subject you choose, from still-life compositions to action figures to landscapes. This book sets you off on a trail of adventure -- and who knows where it will lead! Dive into this book to discover how you can make your pencil do what you tell it to do. Use your new-found skills to improve your paintings, sketch in your field journal, design and illustrate your own business or greeting cards, or create a home school curriculum for your kids -- whatever you desire.

This book is for ages 13 and up -- from college students and art-loving teens, to adults looking for a new career or simply wanting to develop their creative skills.

Written by an award-winning nature book author and college-level instructor in scientific illustration, the text is superbly crafted to make sense to the creative person of any age.

Here are some of the amazing things you can do with this book:

 - Improve the connections between your creative right brain and your organized left brain to create a stunning working partnership. You'll be astonished at the things you can do.
 - Discover techniques of observing a subject, so that you can transmit instructions through your hand and pencil to the paper with accuracy, speed and style.
 - Learn how to sketch living, moving animals using multiple working sketches and additive techniques to achieve vibrant finished drawings.
 - Explore tricks that will enable you to draw fur, scales, wood, feathers, wrinkles, hair fuzz, and other textures found in nature and elsewhere.
 - See shadows and shading the way the professional artist does, and learn how to give your drawings three-dimensional depth with shadows and highlights.
 - Master the mysteries of design to create handsome and interesting drawings, displays, and posters -- anything you want.
 - Learn how to use a computer graphics program to improve your artwork in ways that would be difficult or impossible by hand.
 - Work your way through a hands-on, step-by-step computer scan of your artwork, including guidelines for combining graphic files with text to produce publishable artwork.
 - Understand techniques and ways to critique, fine-tune and improve your own art when you don't have an unbiased expert or teacher to help you out.

Find a whole new artistic consciousness within yourself -- and a great deal more -- in this sturdy book with a stay-open binding, designed for easy use.
Subjects: Technique, Illustrators, Natural history illustration, Vocational guidance
LC classification: QH46.5 .B567 2004