Creative Block

Creative block presents the most crippling—and unfortunately universal—challenge for artists. No longer! This chunky blockbuster of a book is chock-full of solutions for overcoming all manner of artistic impediment. The blogger behind The Jealous Curator interviews 50 successful international artists working in different mediums and mines their insights on how to conquer self-doubt, stay motivated, and get new ideas to flow. Each artist offers a tried-and-true exercise—from road trips to 30-day challenges to cataloging the medicine cabinet— that will kick-start the creative process. Abundantly visual with more than 300 images showcasing these artists' resulting work, Creative Block is a vital ally to students, artists, and creative professionals.

This book helps to improve your process and technique when approaching art, in all its forms. Intriguing, fun and challenging, this book will have you distorting, abstracting, morphing, reinventing and, above all, leaving the box behind. It is filled with over 100 tasks to get your head into a conceptual and creative space, encouraging experimentation and playfulness in art

Our previous title The Writer's Block turned out to be a blockbuster, with more than 50,000 copies sold. That's why we're following it with the illustrated Creative Block, which extends the audience to anyone in need of a creative burst, whether for a business presentation or a first novel. Author Lou Harry, the genius behind our wildly successful Voodoo line, has culled great advice from dozens of well-known contemporary creative people in many genres, from popular fiction (bestselling author Nicholas Sparks) to theater (Tony Award-winning director Robert Falls) to comedy (Saturday Night Live writer Hugh Fink) to children's books (Anna Grossnickle Hines). He presents their comments in his inimitable witty style, keeping readers chuckling even as they break through to new levels of creativity.

In Made by James, top graphic designer James Martin shares techniques, information, and ideas to help you become a better logo designer.

Paint outside the lines! Jumpstart your creativity and inject new life into your art. Struggling to get started? Paralyzed by the fear of failure? Find yourself falling back on the same colors again and again? Just plain stuck? It happens to every artist sooner or later. What can you do to get unstuck quickly and painlessly? Creative Freedom presents 52 strategies for getting out of ruts and venturing beyond your comfort zone, courtesy of 25 artists who have been there, done that. Each approach is illustrated with a step-by-step painting demonstration. Together, they help you experiment with different mediums, new color combinations, fresh approaches to favorite subjects, and more. Try one a week for a year of creative adventure. Or dip in whenever you're feeling inspired. You may be surprised at the creative liberation that comes from... • Painting with your other hand. • Going big with your canvas and brushes. • Painting fast with 10-minute studies. • Limiting your palette. • Starting with a random line drawing or custom painting surface. • Zooming in on one small detail of a landscape for abstract results. • Copying the work of an Old Master. Featuring an exciting variety of styles and mediums (oil, watercolor, acrylic and pastel), novel perspectives and an invigorating sense of play, this book is sure to generate creative sparks and joyful painting sessions. Getting unstuck has never been so fun!

Creative Block: Kids! is a fun and practical art book for children (and their parents!) to start experimenting with creative ideas, play with art and test out new materials and means of making art. It encourages children to play with their creativity, develop new skills and have fun with the results. They are the artist in charge and get to make all the decisions to create their own weird and wonderful work that they would not explore at school. Creative Block: Kids! wants children to have fun and explore their creative ideas. If you can imagine it, you can make it!

One of the great American iconoclasts holds forth on politics, war, books and writers, and his personal life in a series of conversations, including his last published interview. During his long career Kurt Vonnegut won international praise for his novels, plays, and essays. In this new anthology of conversations with Vonnegut—which collects interviews from throughout his career—we learn much about what drove Vonnegut to write and how he viewed his work at the end. From Kurt Vonnegut's last interview Is there another book in you, by chance? No. Look, I’m 84 years old. Writers of fiction have usually done their best work by the time they’re 45. Chess masters are through when they’re 35, and so are baseball players. There are plenty of other people writing. Let them do it. So what’s the old man’s game, then? My country is in ruins. So I’m a fish in a poisoned fishbowl. I’m mostly just heartsick about this. There should have been hope. This should have been a great country. But we are despised all over the world now. I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That’s why I served in World War II, and that’s why I wrote books. When someone reads one of your books, what would you like them to take from the experience? Well, I’d like the guy—or the girl, of course—to put the book down and think, “This is the greatest man who ever lived.”

Finally make a living doing what you love. A compete and easy-to-follow system for the artist who wasn't born with a business mind. Learn how to find buyers, get paid fairly, negotiate nicely, deal with copycats and sell more art.