Alternative Art Surfaces

Indulge your creative curiosity and take your art off the canvas, off the board, and into the brave new world of Alternative Art Surfaces! Mixed-media powerhouse duo Darlene Olivia McElroy and Sandra Duran Wilson, authors of the best-selling books Image Transfer Workshop, Surface Treatment Workshop and Mixed Media Revolution, blaze new creative territory with more than 100 techniques for working on more than 35 unique surfaces in this, their jam-packed fourth book!You'll find something new and exciting on every page: • More than 35 alternative surfaces, including galvanized tin, mica, rawhide, nylon, unsanded grout, slate, spray foam and more • More than 100 techniques for painting, sculpting, creating textures, encasing, carving, printing, transferring and more • More than 125 tips for troubleshooting, preparing your surfaces, finishing and mounting your art, and taking your work to the next level • More than 50 inspiring finished pieces of art showcasing the surfaces and techniques

Artist Toolbox: Surfaces & Supports explores a wide range of drawing and painting surfaces and the unique effects they have on a variety of media. The surface you draw or paint on impacts everything in your artwork, from its texture and brightness to color and durability. Artist Toolbox: Surfaces & Supports covers the drawing and painting surfaces and supports that all artists should know. With this art book, you'll learn the basics and finer points of working on: Canvas Paper Panels Textiles Metal Glass Stone You'll also learn useful tips and techniques for preparing supports to receive media, see how to work with different media on each support, and discover the most effective way to protect your finished artwork. Artist Toolbox: Surfaces & Supports is packed with visual examples, step-by-step tutorials, and demonstrations on the practical aspects of working with graphite and colored pencils;charcoal and pastel;and watercolor, acrylic, and oilpaints. With this reference guide that no artist's library should be without, you can also learn how each support will take a medium. The Artist Toolbox series presents practical reference guides designed for beginning artists interested in fully understanding the focus and function of essential art tools of the trade.

Outstanding refresher course in creative thinking presents more than 300 methods and techniques for helping artists find a new angle for an existing style or get past a creative block.

No Fear Transfers If you have never tried image transfers or have experienced image transfer mishaps, then Image Transfer Workshop is for you. This book presents step-by-step techniques for 35 image transfer processes, extensive tips for fixing mishaps and examples of how to combine transfers in finished pieces of mixed-media art. This comprehensive guide features: 35 Techniques: This book focuses exclusively on making transfers—from simple tape and gel medium transfers to more complex and out of the box techniques, like solar silk screens and plastic wrap transfers. Troubleshooting: Image Transfer Workshop includes extensive answers to help fix problems in transfers gone wrong. You'll learn what to watch for, what to do to get great transfers every time. Dual Styles, Dual Approaches: The authors' different styles illustrate how transfer techniques can take on completely different looks. Finished pieces of art for each technique and a section of completely stepped-out projects are sure to inspire you! Let Image Transfer Workshop help build your image transfer confidence.

Taxidermy, once the province of natural history and dedicated to the pursuit of lifelike realism, has recently resurfaced in the world of contemporary art, culture, and interior design. In Speculative Taxidermy, Giovanni Aloi offers a comprehensive mapping of the discourses and practices that have enabled the emergence of taxidermy in contemporary art. Drawing on the speculative turn in philosophy and recovering past alternative histories of art and materiality from a biopolitical perspective, Aloi theorizes speculative taxidermy: a powerful interface that unlocks new ethical and political opportunities in human-animal relationships and speaks to how animal representation conveys the urgency of addressing climate change, capitalist exploitation, and mass extinction. A resolutely nonanthropocentric take on the materiality of one of the most controversial mediums in art, this approach relentlessly questions past and present ideas of human separation from the animal kingdom. It situates taxidermy as a powerful interface between humans and animals, rooted in a shared ontological and physical vulnerability. Carefully considering a select number of key examples including the work of Nandipha Mntambo, Maria Papadimitriou, Mark Dion, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Roni Horn, Oleg Kulik, Steve Bishop, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, and Cole Swanson, Speculative Taxidermy contextualizes the resilient presence of animal skin in the gallery space as a productive opportunity to rethink ethical and political stances in human-animal relationships.

Artist Toolbox: Surfaces & Supports explores a wide range of drawing and painting surfaces and the unique effects they have on a variety of media. The surface you draw or paint on impacts everything in your artwork, from its texture and brightness to color and durability. Artist Toolbox: Surfaces & Supports covers the drawing and painting surfaces and supports that all artists should know. With this art book, you'll learn the basics and finer points of working on: Canvas Paper Panels Textiles Metal Glass Stone You'll also learn useful tips and techniques for preparing supports to receive media, see how to work with different media on each support, and discover the most effective way to protect your finished artwork. Artist Toolbox: Surfaces & Supports is packed with visual examples, step-by-step tutorials, and demonstrations on the practical aspects of working with graphite and colored pencils;charcoal and pastel;and watercolor, acrylic, and oilpaints. With this reference guide that no artist's library should be without, you can also learn how each support will take a medium. The Artist Toolbox series presents practical reference guides designed for beginning artists interested in fully understanding the focus and function of essential art tools of the trade.

Recycle, Reuse, Reinvent! With Mixed Media Revolution, you'll learn how to leverage your art and take your paintings and transfers to the next level! Leftovers, little bits and scraps, pieces of art that didn't turn out quite right ... we all have them. And it hurts to have to throw them away. But what if someone could suggest another way? Another way, perhaps, to get one more use out of that transparency. Or cut up a piece of art and put it back together differently. Or use leftover paint to create one-of-a-kind transfers? Darlene Olivia McElroy and Sandra Duran Wilson, in their groundbreaking third book, will show you how to do all those things and more! Inside You'll Find: 10 themed chapters More than 50 fully stepped-out, photographic mixed media techniques More than 80 additional fast and easy techniques Dozens of troubleshooting tips and variations More than 70 big, beautiful finished pieces of art illustrating the techniques Links to online bonus content You'll find something new and exciting on every page--add Mixed Media Revolution to your creative toolbox and expand your artistic horizons today!

In Breaking the Surface, Doug Bailey offers a radical alternative for understanding Neolithic houses, providing much-needed insight not just into prehistoric practice, but into another way of doing archaeology. Using his years of fieldwork experience excavating the early Neolithic pit-houses of southeastern Europe, Bailey exposes and elucidates a previously under-theorized aspect of prehistoric pit construction: the actions and consequences of digging defined as breaking the surface of the ground. Breaking the Surface works through the consequences of this redefinition in order to redirect scholarship on the excavation and interpretation of pit-houses in Neolithic Europe, offering detailed critiques of current interpretations of these earliest European architectural constructions. The work of the book is performed by juxtaposing richly detailed discussions of archaeological sites (Etton and The Wilsford Shaft in the UK, and Magura in Romania), with the work of three artists-who-cut (Ron Athey, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lucio Fontana), with deep and detailed examinations of the philosophy of holes, the perceptual psychology of shapes, and the linguistic anthropology of cutting and breaking words, as well as with cultural diversity in framing spatial reference and through an examination of pre-modern ungrounded ways of living. Breaking the Surface is as much a creative act on its own-in its mixture of work from disparate periods and regions, its use of radical text interruption, and its juxtaposition of text and imagery-as it is an interpretive statement about prehistoric architecture. Unflinching and exhilarating, it is a major development in the growing subdiscipline of art/archaeology.