5 comments about Airbrushing (Artist's Library series #09).

1. I've read seven airbrush books in the 4 and 5 star range. This was book number seven and by far the best book on simple airbrushing techniques. The frisket cutting and blending exercises are precise and inexpensive to reproduce. Getting into airbrushing is expensive and it is difficult to find classes or good books. This book will get you started on airbrush painting technique in an hour or two of reading time. Sometimes the cheapest book is the best!



2. I studied technical illustration many years ago and wanted to try airbrushing as a hobby. I think that this book covers the basics well and provides useful exercises with emphasis on the shading of objects. Well worth the price.



3. I love this book and i'm in airbrushing schoo



4. I love this book and i'm in airbrushing schoo



5. I love this book and i'm in airbrushing schoo

4 comments about Milton, A Poem (The Illuminated Books of William Blake, Volume 5).

1. The editors of this great work recognize its difficulties and that it is usually only the domain of specialists. They have filled to volume it commentary, notes, and helps to try and help the general reader to penetrate aspects of this extended poem / lyric / myth. The style is so personal to Blake and so unlike any other writer's style that it is hard for most of us to make sense of what each character means in any instance. A further difficulty is that there really isn't a narrative path or plot or much to help the reader move from one moment to the next. Blake had a view of reality has so multi-layered with each being having simultaneous multiple identities and manifestations that our normal way of viewing reality is quite useless.

   The plates are beautifully reproduced with wonderful coloring and great images. It is a poem you can tackle as you wish, but plan on spending a lot of time thinking about it before it yields much to you.

   For those readers who love Blake this is a great volume to add to your collection.




2. I hate Blake. He and his Zoas and Los can go suck the ample breasts of Albion's emanation Jerusalem. At least Joyce (the only other person I know with this personal mythology splattered out for everyone) had a sense of humor. This guy, though.
   Nevertheless, the illustrations are something, and there is something in the poem, I don't know exactly what it is (nor does anyone else, regardless of how convoluted and esoteric their arguments), but I'm convinced that in order to understand the least bit of these poems, you must read them all. Study them, in fact. The notes in this version are very good, and the extra illustrations are great, particularly the painting of Adam and Eve discovering Abel with Cain running off covering his newly marked forehead. Also, there is a large Lacoon, undoubtedly Blake's best thing. (I don't want to call it a poem, painting, or even "work" for some reason).



3. Try as I might, I haven't come up with the blend of radical individualism thwarted by universal awareness which would make this kind of book an intellectual treat for most people. I have read the poems by William Blake (just a few thousand lines, really) that are in this book before, and I even compared the abridged copy of his poems which I've had for years with a complete text from the library to discover what I could about the process of selection. Most of this is still a big mystery to a lot of people, and buying this book was my first attempt to get the whole picture of what a lot of professors might think about a single work, which is printed on plates numbered 1, then 1 to 8, 8*, 9 to 32, 32*, 33 to 46, then a Preface, copy B, plate 2, and even a plate f, followed by variations of the pictures which were on plate 13 and other Supplementary Illustrations. I had some trouble making out words on the colored plates, so the most educational part of the book for me is the printed text with notes from pages 111 to 217.

   Milton is a great figure in English literature, and the great poems which place Satan and God in a struggle that makes Adam and Eve seem like minor characters are the intellectual context for Blake's effort to write a poem using Milton to write about things that minor characters wouldn't even want to talk about. Things don't really start happening for me until plate 12, "According to the inspiration of the Poetic Genius/Who is the eternal all-protecting Divine Humanity" that Milton actually rose up and said, "I go to Eternal Death!" Don't expect to meet anyone saying such things on our streets. This attempt to be instructive in the art of self-annihilation produces one of the great intellectual puzzles of eternal questions, which attempt not to apply to a particular place and time. My appreciation of John Milton and William Blake is more concerned with their ideas than with artistic techniques. The importance of Blake was suggested, more than it was demonstrated, by Theodore Roszak in THE MAKING OF A COUNTER CULTURE, Chapter VIII, "Eyes of Flesh, Eyes of Fire," which observes that a "perfectly sensible interpretation . . . would tell us, for example, that the poet Blake, under the influence of Swedenborgian mysticism, developed a style based on esoteric visionary correspondences . . . Etc. Etc. Footnote." (Roszak, p. 239). What really impressed me was the intellectual context established in the Bibliographical Notes, at the end of THE MAKING OF A COUNTER CULTURE, which states, "Anything Blake ever wrote seems supremely relevant to the search for alternative realities." (p. 302). The radical element of that thought needs to be understood in a way that affirms the religious significance of what Blake was trying to accomplish, and other scholars might overlook how this search in Blake's work might oppose their own assumptions about our cultural inheritance. Harold Bloom, in BLAKE'S APOCALYPSE, (1963, shortly before the radical part of the sixties) said "The dark Satanic Mills have nothing to do with industrialism, but" poetically pick the most common example for why those who are bored might want to complain of "The same dull round, even of a universe, would soon become a mill with complicated wheels." (Bloom, p. 305). There are a lot of names to explain, as Bloom does in his book, and the scholars employed by Tate Gallery Publications for the production of this book display an extraordinary amount of work on this project for that purpose, and the intellectual puzzles are what remains mysterious even after learning what knowledge is available.

   At the heart of the poem, "Milton," is the question of what such a character might mean to William Blake, and how, long after Milton's death, he might be of some use. A lot of works have been written to give an author the opportunity to say something that he wouldn't have otherwise had a chance to say, and this book seems to be one of the unique cases of a work which tries to say something that no one else is saying. Instead of treating Milton like anyone who had been dead for more than a hundred years, the treatment of Milton's thought also supposes that it exists through an "Emanation, Sixfold presumably because he had three wives and three daughters." (Bloom, p. 308). Bloom thinks this book is a result of "a complex relation of responsibility to what he has made, though his creation is in torment because scattered through the creation." (p. 308). After John Milton had become blind, his wives and daughters represented a tremendous portion of his remaining contact with the world.

   Walter Kaufmann, in LIFE AT THE LIMITS, considered a sonnet by the blind Milton about a dream in which one of his wives, who had died, was seen by him "Brought back to me like Alcestis from the grave." The reality expressed in the final line of that poem, "I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night," seemed to Kaufmann to be "the most powerful last line of any English short poem." (LIFE AT THE LIMITS, p. 75). Blake approached this situation, in which picturing another person might be considered the strongest link with any reality, with what modern readers might consider an unctiously religious picture on plate 15, with the caption (explained on p. 139 with, "The giving up of selfhood to achieve a more inclusive sense of self is essential for the artist to create" which isn't so scary if it is only applied to artists and monks): "To annihilate the Self-[there is a foot here in the picture]-hood of Deceit & False Forgiveness." Then plate 16 starts with "In those three females whom his Wives, & those three whom his Daughters/Had represented and containd. that they might be resume'd / By giving up of Selfhood:" This poetic division of a single poet into six male-female relationships is the most surprising thing in the poem, for me. Trying to apply it to religion states a much more radical understanding of what religion has to offer than most people expect if they merely go to church, which seems to be one of Roszak's points about how our culture accepts religion by making it strictly mainstream, totally "God Bless America" as the most popular current phrase goes. Much of the scholarship on the creation of Blake's large works notes how uncommercial it was in Blake's day, as "Hayley discouraged him from anything other than `the meer drudgery of business' (p. 14)" and this book tries to make that picture perfectly clear.

   In one of the few small works at the end of this book, Blake complained:

   The Classics, it is the Classics! / & not Goths nor Monks, that / Desolate Europe with Wars. (p. 264)

   I feel the same way, complaining about some books, but Blake assumed a society in which people were actually being taught things like a Platonic belief in forms, and the Classics were a large element of what seemed bad to him. He might have felt differently if he ever had a chance to observe our formless void, where any claim to wisdom is highly suspect. We can only look the other way.




4. Princeton University Press has thoroughly impressed me with this series. Using higher quality paper than I've ever seen in publishing, along with an unheard-of *six* color printing process, they have reproduced the colors like never before. In addition to the color plates, a full reprint of the text is included in typescript, as well as informed and thoughtful commentary. Well done! Too bad the hardback is out of print (or was at the time of this review).

2 comments about Creating 3D Worlds: With CD-ROM.

1. I have read two of Simon Danaher's full color books. His writing style combines perfectly with the full color 3D illustrations in a way that makes the book a pleasure to read, even more than once. It is an excellent reference and contains many tips on the ways a variety of effects and results can be obtained. The book frequently references popular tools such as Vue, Bryce and Cinema4D, and comes with a CD filled with examples that compliment the book.



2. This book is filled with tips. Nothing really new that you can't find through a lot of searching and tutorials on the web, but it is a nice reference book to have on hand.

No comments about Metric Pattern Cutting for Menswear.

1 comments about The World of Lith Printing: The Best of Traditional Darkroom and Digital Lith Printing Techniques.

1. I started lith printing about a year ago (based on Tim's other lith printing book) and haven't stopped since. This book shows examples of different styles and techniques that really helped me to understand what it possible. Since there are few references on the subject, this book provides needed inspriation to those of us that want to become better lith printers. The only shortcoming is that many of the materials listed are discontinued. The good news is that many new, suitable materials have emerged. Tim keeps a reasonably up to date list on his web site.

1 comments about MADvertising: A MAD Look at 50 Years of MADison Avenue.

1. As a devoted MAD reader, I immediately purchased this volume when I saw it was available. I have fond memories of the MAD ad satires of my youth, and a cumulative look at this grand tradition proved to be irresistible.
   
   MADVERTISING does offer a very enjoyable retrospective at my chuckles of yesteryear, as well as material that preceded and followed my subscription days. Naturally, the key to enjoying many of these ad satires is the witty ad copy that guys like Nick Meglin and Dick DeBartolo came up with. But despite the generous size of this book, time and again I was thwarted in my attempt to actually READ their lampoons. That's because the ads are sometimes reproduced herein at a fraction of their original size, reducing their words to micro-fonts. Dang it!
   
   But this book does allow us to give a "hats off" to some of the magazine's illustrators and designers. Bob Clarke and (Frank) Kelly Freas in particular created artwork for MAD that was genuinely superior to the art accompanying the "real" ads of their day. In this regard, MADVERTISING does a good job reproducing their extremely clever visuals.

2 comments about How to Design Logos, Symbols and Icons: 24 Internationally Renowned Studios Reveal How They Develop Trademarks for Print and New Media.

1. I bought this book with the idea of creating logos but that was a mistake. But it's a great book when you are interested in processes. This book shows how companies design logos and their process of getting from start to end. So, much talk about the process, no talk about the techniques.



2. I bought this book in the hardcover and still refer to it all the time. Awesome guide to how some of the top firms create logos and their process. I still recommend this book to everyone, especially at this price!

No comments about Graphic Design: A History (Discoveries).

No comments about Sempe: Mixed Messages (Sempe).

4 comments about Authentic Everyday Dress of the Renaissance: All 154 Plates from the "Trachtenbuch".

1. I was very annoyed to find the sketches/plates in this book to be in Black and White, not color. I specifically bought this book to get a better idea of the colors available in the time period. I am sorely disappointed in the publishers for creating a book of art entirely without color.



2. This book, in it's large size format and the wonderful colour pictures is a must for any costumer or medievalist. The images inspire you to make the clothing then find a horse and go parading down cobbled streets. Aaah, we can but dream



3. This is a basic book for those interested in history of costume in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. These are drawings of the clothing of the time made by an artist of the time. A range of people from a wide variety of walks of life and professions, as well as from many regions and countries, are presented. Gives an idea of what ordinary people wore, those who couldn't afford to have their portraits painted.



4. This book is a selection of illustrations from the 'Trachtenbuch.' This is a good source of ideas for late medieval/early renaissance costumers. The illustrations are "sketchbook" quality. The author seems to have travelled extensively and sketched the people of the cities that he visited. Costumers may find it difficult to translate the sketches into actual articles of clothing.