Based upon the author’s own successful workshops, Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner helps new artists create competent, often eloquent drawings. A series of progressive lessons demonstrates such essential skills as recording edges, creating dimension, adding accuracy, developing value, balancing compositional elements, and drawing the human face, both frontal and profile views. Step by step, readers learn how to create a reasonable likeness of an object and give it spatial depth using such simple black-and-white mediums as pens, pencils, charcoal, and graphite wash. Inspirational examples and tips for success from beginning students who have worked on the same material confirm readers’ successes, and allow readers to consider the advice and impressions of others at the same level.
Claire Garcia is an artist, writer, and teacher. She is an instructor at New England's renowned Silvermine School of Art, in New Canaan, CT, where her workshops and courses "for the Absolute and Utter Beginner" have been popular for over twenty years. She also teaches at Brookfield Craft Center in Brookfield, CT,one of the preeminent craft schools in the Northeast, where she gives drawing classes adapted to the needs of craft artists.See her artwork, find out more about the "for the absolute and utter beginner" books,classes, and upcoming exhibitions of her work at www.clairewatsongarcia.com
Garcia combines her passion for creating, teaching, and writing about art in her books "Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner"-which Library Journal called "...simply the best beginners' drawing book available," and its companion, the recently published "Painting for the Absolute and Utter Beginner." Both books are based on the successful methods she developed and tested while teaching aspiring artists in the classroom studio, as well on as on her own lifetime experience as a working artist.
Each book features the author's signature approach: an informal, supportive tone and a sequence of instruction which starts beginners at the very first step of the learning experience, where no previous experience is necessary. Accessible projects help the beginner gain confidence while slowly building the skills necessary for them to take on increasingly challenging subjects. Art work and commentary by beginners using the methods presented in the book are featured alongside the author's own instructional step-by-step illustrations and text.
An accomplished and recognized artist, Garcia's work has been exhibited in numerous national juried exhibitions including: Art of the Northeast; Faber Birren Color Show, CT; as well as at the Katonah Museum, NY; Stamford Museum, CT; Cheltenham Center for the Arts, PA; and the Creative Arts Workshop, New Haven. Among other juried shows,in 2010 her work appeared in Solo Shows at the Westport Art Center, and in Continuum Gender Identities 2011 at Ridgefield Guild of Artists.
Throughout her career, Garcia has combined her writing and artistic skills. As a founding member of Kids Can Press, a groundbreaking children's book publishing house in Toronto, she wrote and/ or illustrated three well received children's books: "The Peanut Plan", "Harriet and the Great Bike Robbery", and "The Green Harpy at the Corner Store" (Rosemary Allison, author). She was primary illustrator for The Women's Kit, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (publisher), a pioneering multimedia kit created to present positive gender issues to high school students.
Educated at Smith College and University of California, Berkeley, from which she earned a BA with a fine arts major, she received additional training at the Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College, and California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts.)
Claire Garcia grew up in CT and after living in CA, VA, and Toronto, Canada, returned to CT, where she lives with her husband Baxter, a computer consultant and director of CHART(Communities Healing through Art), a non-profit group that utilizes creative arts therapies in humanitarian relief, along with a variety of savvy cats who manage to find their house. Daughter Liz is a screenwriter (Cold Case)and lives in Hollywood with her husband, and writing partner, the actor Josh Harto (Dark Knight). Their recent co-productions inclulde Memphis Beat (on TNT) and a beautiful baby boy (Wilder)!
