This impressive guidebook to techniques for an aspiring fantasy artist, covering traditional and digital media, features ideas for writing, graphics and movies. Many of the best fantasy paintings imply a narrative, with inspiration coming from childhood memories, dreams, books, movies, mythology, or other works of art, for instance the symbolism of pre-Raphaelite painters such as Burne Jones or mystics like William Blake. The important thing is to open your mind. Tools and techniques are many and varied, including pencil, charcoal, ink, markers, watercolour, acrylics, oils, digital tools and software. Many fantasy artists start in a traditional medium then scan the picture to be developed digitally. Among the examples is a Wizard created in ballpoint, watercolour, and gouache. A Fallen Angel starts with a photo, then a drawing and finally sophisticated digital refinement. Techniques made possible by software are dodge and burn, the brush smudge, hue brightness, and the use of different brush widths. Concepts include the creation of a humanoid starting with a life drawing, then using exaggeration and distortion, but stopping short of caricature. Anthropomorphism is often very effective, for instance a tree with face in the work of Arthur Rackham. Other popular motifs are swords and sorcery, dragons, enchantment, charms, and cliffs. People can be beautiful but the context, lighting and style might indicate whether they are to be trusted. 192pp, ringbound hard cover, colour illustrations on every page.

The vehicles of the Marvel comic universe are one of its many glories, and in this comprehensive guide superb graphics enhance the narrative surrounding S.H.I.E.L.D., the organisation tasked with defending the freedoms of every living human being. Not only graphics, but cutaway drawings and full tech specs tell the story of each vehicle piloted by different Avengers, Rangers and Guardians of the Galaxy, together with full information about enemy vehicles. Comment boxes by Cyclops, Nick Fury, Tony Stark, Chase Stein, Spiderman, Beta Ray Bill and others add a personal perspective to the overall picture. X-Vehicles include Stratijet, Dove, X-Copter and Blackbirds of several generations. The first Blackbird is a custom-design RS-150, successor to the Stratijet and leading to a new co-operation with the X-Men, while the second generation was destroyed when the X-men went after Count Nefaria. The third generation was overseen by the mutant technological savant known as Forge. The X on the fuselage came with the 4th generation and was taken over by Cyclops on the collapse of X-corporation. Featured Helicarriers include not only the Iliad but also HAMMER, an ugly vehicle destroyed in the siege of Asgard. The section on Aircraft includes the three Quinjets and Alpha Flight Omnijet Shield Flycar with its underwater capacity. Motorcycles and Guardians of the Galaxy ships are also featured. 110pp, softback, spectacular colour graphics on most pages.

Stan Lee made his name with the Marvel universe and was widely known as the creator of the superheroes X-Men, Spiderman, and the Fantastic Four. This book, first published in 2003, follows Stan's career and ends with his struggle to be credited as creator of Spiderman with the legal aspects still ongoing. The authors are at pains to point out that Lee was co-creator of the big Marvel names, revitalising the Marvel Universe in collaboration with artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, and responsibility was never going to be clear cut. Joining the family firm in his teens Lee was in a privileged position but he worked hard for market share, enabling his artists Kirby and Ditko to do their best work using the Marvel Method, which involved working to Lee's synopsis. The three-way collaboration left all the men scarred. Following the decline of Timely comics with characters such as Captain America, Lee turned the company round as both an editor and marketing manager. Ditko specialised in stylish figures whose tortured body language suggested simmering emotional turmoil. He was responsible for the moral framework of the Marvel Universe where the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy and the X-Men co-existed in a symbiotic world that was able to be infinitely extended. Lee became a public figure at the age of 38 and never stepped away from the spotlight. Even after creating the Hulk, the Silver Surfer and other iconic names he stayed on the front line lecture circuit at the request of the company. "I'm a real ham" he said, describing his love of an audience. He was the guest of honour at numerous comic-book festivals from the 1970s, earning hefty bonuses and the Popular Culture Award of Excellence. 304pp, paperback, photos.

Cameos and Intaglios are different in technique but have the same aim: to create a work of decorative art where the artist's skill in creating an image acts as a showcase for the beauty of the stone. With an intaglio, the picture is created by cutting into the stone and using what lies below to create the design; with a cameo, the design rises above the level of the stone as a relief. Almost 3000 years ago the Old Testament Book of Exodus describes a high priest's breastplate as having 12 engraved stones, and the Roman author Pliny devoted a book of his Natural History to gems and precious stones. Highly sophisticated cameos and intaglios are pictured from Egypt in the last centuries BCE. The Minoan and Mycenean civilisations had engraved gemstones, with a beautiful example being a bull hit by a spear from around 1500 BCE. Dexamenos is a named artist from 500 BCE and his intaglio of a heron in flight was found in the Crimea. In the medieval period gemstone carving was used on reliquaries and liturgical vessels. A Botticelli portrait from 1480 clearly shows a woman wearing an intaglio pendant, and intaglio became a collectors' speciality in the 17th and 18th centuries, continuing into the public buildings of the 19th century. 20 softback pages, 11 of which are cardboard pullouts opening up into two double spreads. Beautiful colour photos.

The landscape painter Corot is not primarily known for his portraits of women, but this Washington National Gallery catalogue celebrates a significant body of work which the author argues places Corot ahead of his time in the modernist school of portraiture. Corot was noted for his respect for his models and they treated him as a father-figure, a far cry from the stereotype of seduction and exploitation associated with model-artist relationships in the later 19th century. Unlike his contemporaries, Corot preferred a model to move about during a sitting, so that inevitably the finished portrait was not the capture of a moment but a representation of the play of transitory moods. Four authoritative essays by Mary Morton, David Ogawa, Sebastien Allard and Heather McPherson bring the reader developments in Corot scholarship. Figure paintings occupied his final two decades from 1855 to 1875 but they were rarely exhibited during his lifetime. After Corot's death his friend Mary Cassatt was a strong advocate for his figure painting with collectors. The portraits fall into three categories: nudes, single figures in costume, and a late series of allegorical figures. Corot used photos to achieve realism, a technique still in its infancy, and his nudes were attacked by critics and buyers who wanted something more idealised, though his figures have since been compared with the realism of Courbet and Manet. Corot's favourite model was Emma Dobigny who also sat for Degas and Puvis de Chavannes. Among his costumed figures, "The Blonde Gascon" impressed 20th century admirers with the sheer physical authority of the figure, particularly the face, while "The Algerian Woman" has strong features and a direct gaze looking out from the swathes of her headdress. Corot's studio portraits include a series of models involved in the act of painting, transfigured by cultural associations. 179pp, 99 reproductions including 45 full page colour plates.
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Artemisia Gentileschi was the greatest female artists of the Baroque age and one of the most brilliant followers of the great Caravaggio. As a young woman she was raped by her tutor, and then had to endure a seven month long trial during which she was brutally examined by the authorities. This very readable short biography tells us everything we need to know about the life of an extraordinary woman from a rough bit of Rome who survived multiple misogynies to become one of the most sought-after artists of the 17th century, and most celebrated artists of the Italian Baroque. She is currently being celebrated at the Royal Academy of Art in London in a special exhibition. A contemporary of Shakespeare and Rembrandt and friend of Galileo, she was a great woman in an age we usually associate with great men. The emotional directness of her paintings helped to make European art more human and approachable in the democratisation of culture known as the Baroque. She was a child prodigy trained by her artist father and could paint like an expert by the time she was 17. An obvious example of her pain and anger about her own rape is Judith and Holofernes, in which two women are depicted slaughtering a man. Artemisia escaped a hopeless marriage to live independently as the head of a household and brought up her daughter by herself, had at least one passionate affair, and became celebrated for her articulacy, talent and beauty. She worked for the Medici in Florence, and for Charles I in London. She could certainly dress the part and perform music like a born courtier, but she had in reality been born on the wrong side of a dung-spattered alley, growing up illiterate among artists who acted like thugs and who were in and out of prison. She never really lost her rough edge and was as real as her paintings. Painter, murderer and friend of her father, Caravaggio's sensational fusion of art and life enthralled her. A superb introduction, 128pp with 20 colour plates including her most famous works Daivd and Goliath and Susanna and the Elders.

'Some may look at the decay in these buildings as simply reflecting the destruction of the Soviet Bloc and the moral bankruptcy of a flawed ideological system. I perceive them as museums, the buildings and extant objects as beautiful exhibits. They are memorials to the ordinary people who once lived and worked there, but whose existence, whose stories are ephemeral; and at risk of being extinguished forever, if they are not somehow recorded.' Like a ghost hunt, this photographer has indeed recorded faded memories of the former Soviet Union his first trip to the abandoned town of Pripyat, Ukraine, in October 2012, the town that served the powerplant at Chernobyl. His second trip was to Bulgaria to see the abandoned Communist Monument up the beautiful Mount Buzludzha. It is as if life just stood still - with not a human in sight we see inside the dilapidated swimming pool at Pripyat Sports Centre, the strewn books at the Young Pioneer Camp Russia, with access to the dilapidated Teufelsberg Spy Station, East Germany, the Cosmonaut Memorial, Russia, with an old space suit, a satellite communication centre in Russia, the inside of an Antonov aircraft in Bulgaria, a dusty pool table and peeling walls of a sanatorium in Russia with discarded pill bottles, stirrup chairs and other contraptions for the poor inmates, filthy curtains half torn down and blood stained beds. Here is life and work behind the Iron Curtain and inside the Wünsdorf Soviet headquarters East Germany in imagery which becomes surreal and almost suffocating in its post-society, post-human post-life. There are military spaces which once directed such supreme power in the Cold War "now left in an alternative post-apocalyptic vacuum, weeping with the irony that mocks them." Yet there are glimmers of architectural genius with spiral staircases, beautiful wrought ironwork, mosaics, stained glass windows, gigantic proportions and above-cloud vistas, plus of course the prisons and functional aspects of the Soviet-built Communist structures. Breathtaking in its artistry is the monument of the Bulgarian Soviet Friendship hewn in stone with four identical military figures in a cubist style towering over a city. Sights we would never otherwise see, mostly in full page colour photos which Rebecca Litchfield has personally visited as she describes the forgotten historic locations and the ideologies that built them. Approx. 10" square and 200 pages.
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A remarkable gallery of artworks, presented on big glossy white pages, all in original line art, charcoal and pencil drawings, the books showcases the work of contemporary combat artists and illustrators from the Great War era. It is a vivid graphic record of life and death on the high seas from the outbreak of the war just prior to the Battle of Jutland as reported to contemporary audiences while the events were still unfolding. There is a heart wrenchingly tragic image of rescue work after the disappearance of the Lusitania, with drowning and drowned casualties being hauled from the water into small rescue boats by sailors; a Zeppelin holding up a merchant vessel in the North Sea in a dramatic image, the sinking of the Turkish battleship Messudiyeh by submarine B11, a captioned diagram of the enemy destroyer sank at the mouth of the Ems River, a pen and ink portrait of the First Lord (Churchill with his two highest executive Officers), the famous exploit of Commander Cecil H. Fox who sent four German destroyers to the bottom, his men standing alongside their huge guns, watching the vessels flounder; upturned vessels and propellers, Britain's deadly mosquitos of the ocean, throwing overboard all inflammable luxuries when a battleship is cleared for action, mine layers at work and an amazing drawing giving a splendid idea of the hugeness of provisioning a warship with 120lbs of cake, six cases of sardines, 36 cooked hams and 270 dozen fresh eggs among the cargo. Here is a remarkable double page spread of the painting Gassed by John Singer Sargeant with many blinded casualties and 1st Artist Rifles by Paul Nash. Hundreds of images, 128 page softback, 8" x 10".

Oceans, rivers, forests, caves, deserts, skies and soil are home to extraordinary species from the tiny dragon-like olm to the colossal sequoia tree. They have survived for hundreds of thousands of years by adapting to unique environments, but their future remains far from certain. Their story is our story too. This book is a stunning homage to the planet's most mysterious, bizarre and wondrous creatures and plants, a love letter to life on Earth and an urgent summons to protect what is precious and lovely in our world. Exquisitely illustrated with beautiful full page, double page and other artworks in colour throughout, we meet the Amur tiger, Chinese crested tern, Kakapo, Sunda pangolin, dusky gopher frog, Andean condor, Javan rhinoceros, Ethiopian wolf and African grey parrot, all vanishing species that are diminished by wildlife trading, hunting or destruction of habitat. In the insect world we meet the pine hoverfly, dung beetles, lesser long-nosed bat, European turtledove and Iberian lynx and rust lemur, all species that grow out of soil, nourish it, or have been made rare by our use of land. Then there are species that live in the deep ocean, in coral reefs, mangroves and some of the species affected by Australian bush fires. The book is organised by air, water, soil and homo sapiens, and each beautiful drawing has been engraved, printed and coloured by hand by the author Beatrice Forshall in this beautiful Bloomsbury publication. 256 pages, 18.5 x 27cm.
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The Book of Symbols combines original and incisive essays about particular symbols with representative images from all parts of the world and all eras of history. The highly readable texts and almost 800 beautiful full-colour images come together in a unique way to convey hidden dimensions of meaning. Each of the 350 essays examines a given symbol's psychic background and how it evokes psychic processes and dynamics. Etymological roots, the play of opposites, paradox and shadow, the ways in which diverse cultures have engaged a symbolic image-all these factors are taken into consideration. Authored by writers from the fields of psychology, religion, art, literature, and comparative myth, the essays flow into each other in ways that mirror the psyche's unexpected convergences. The Book of Symbols illuminates how to move from the visual experience of a symbolic image in art, religion, life, or dreams, to directly experiencing its personal and psychological resonance. 6½" x 9½", 810 pages.