Illustrating Nature: Right-Brain Art in a Left-Brain World [Paperback]

Irene Brady (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2004

Illustrating Nature ~ Right-brain Art in a Left-brain World is the secret doorway to realistic drawing – open this book and find the kind of instruction that you’ve always wanted.

Even if nature isn’t your all-time hot interest, the bountiful illustrations, generous tips, and step-by-step tutorials focusing on natural objects you can find anywhere, anytime, will give you a jump-start on any other type of subject you choose, from still-life compositions to action figures to landscapes. This book sets you off on a trail of adventure ~ and who knows where it will lead! Dive into this book to discover how you can make your pencil do what you tell it to do. Use your new-found skills to improve your paintings, sketch in your field journal, design and illustrate your own business or greeting cards, or create a home school curriculum for your kids – whatever you desire.

This book is for ages 13 and up;– from college students and art-loving teens, to adults looking for a new career or simply wanting to develop their creative skills.

Written by an award-winning nature book author and college-level instructor in scientific illustration, the text is superbly crafted to make sense to the creative person of any age.

Here are some of the amazing things you can do with this book:

Improve the connections between your creative right brain and your organized left brain to create a stunning working partnership. YouÂ’ll be astonished at the things you can do.

Discover techniques of observing a subject, so that you can transmit instructions through your hand and pencil to the paper with accuracy, speed and style.

Learn how to sketch living, moving animals using multiple working sketches and additive techniques to achieve vibrant finished drawings.

Explore tricks that will enable you to draw fur, scales, wood, feathers, wrinkles, hair fuzz, and other textures found in nature and elsewhere.

See shadows and shading the way the professional artist does, and learn how to give your drawings three-dimensional depth with shadows and highlights.

Master the mysteries of design to create handsome and interesting drawings, displays, and posters ~ anything you want.

Learn how to use a computer graphics program to improve your artwork in ways that would be difficult or impossible by hand.

Work your way through a hands-on, step-by-step computer scan of your artwork, including guidelines for combining graphic files with text to produce publishable artwork.

Understand techniques and ways to critique, fine-tune and improve your own art when you donÂ’t have an unbiased expert or teacher to help you out.

Find a whole new artistic consciousness within yourself ~and a great deal more ~ in this sturdy book with a stay-open binding, designed for easy use.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Finally, a book that shows you, step-by-step, how to get the artistic results you want. Other art instructional books show you the beautiful final product (and if you’re lucky, a couple of interim steps) but leave you pretty much hanging in the wind about how to get from point A to point B. And few of them give you any background about HOW and WHY it all works together to get you to your final goal. Have you ever seen a book that shows you how to draw moving objects with confidence and skill? Illustrating Nature, Right-brain Art in a Left-brain World does. And that's just the beginning!

This book is designed to make art logical, simple, doable and fun. Improving your artistic prowess can be as simple as picking and choosing from a lavish array of simple tricks to improve your skills, or as involved as going through the book step by step to arrive at a point where you can draw what you see with confidence and pride.

We’ve never seen another book like this. It is being used by homeschoolers to give their children the skills to illustrate their journals and assignments (and entertain themselves!). College classes are using it as a textbook to learn scientific illustration. And it’s being used by ordinary people to learn how to do what they’ve always dreamed of – to be able to draw exactly what they see.

If art instructional books that promised a lot but left you scratching your head and filling trash baskets with wadded-up sketches have put you off before, try this one for a refreshing change.

We think this unique book is going to give Betty Robert’s book, Drawing From the Right Side of the Brain, some heavy competition.

From the Author

This book began several years ago as a collection of handouts for an illustration class which accepted students at all levels of art proficiency – from close to zero to college art majors. Out of necessity, I had to polish it into a form that could be used at all levels of skill.

It remained just an expanding accumulation of handouts until my students, non-student acquaintances, and homeschoolers started begging me to put them together into a book they could use outside the class.

So I did. The exercises and projects in this book have been tested, critiqued, enriched and polished by hundreds of eager, sharp-eyed students. Their work is found throughout the book right alongside my own – a distillation of what I have taught them plus all they have taught me. This collaboration has produced a no-frills manual starting with basics, proceeding to advanced techniques, and capable of producing accomplished artists by the end of the book.

It’s tried and true, whatever your artistic background, if you put your heart into it. Enjoy!

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 166 pages
• Publisher: Nature Works (November 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0915965089
• ISBN-13: 978-0915965083
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #64,302 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #46 in Books > Arts & Photography > Study & Teaching

More About the Author

For the last twenty-five years of so I've lived in the Oregon madrone woods about three miles from the nearest town. Most of the time I write and illustrate nature books for kids (and adults who like lots of pictures and clear explanations like I do!). When I can find the time, I go exploring -- to the beach, the mountains, to the jungle and beach in Costa Rica and New Zealand with my friend, Dan, and into the woods to visit a hawk nest or down to the creek to watch for dippers (little gray birds that walk under water)right here around home .

Writing and illustrating has been a lifetime project for me. I started when I was 19, with my first book, AMERICA'S HORSES AND PONIES, published five years later, in 1969, by Houghton Mifflin.

I wrote and illustrated a lot more books for HM, Scribners, and several other publishers, won some awards, and illustrated articles for Audubon, Ranger Rick Nature Magazine and others.

For several years I was the Scientific Illustrator at the National Fish & Wildlife Forensics Lab in Ashland, Oregon, doing graphics, illustrating papers, and making courtroom displays for such things as the Exxon Valdez (oil spill) trial and others. It was great to be able to help wildlife hands-on.

Now I'm back to writing and illustrating my own books full time, painting and inking art for Forest Service and nature center interpretive signs, and teaching scientific illustration at Southern Oregon University.

In 1999 I published the first in a series of books about the wild places of America -- The Redrock Canyon Explorer -- which featured the wild canyons of the Southwest. Writing and illustrating it took me about three years. It's carried in state and national parks and monuments, bookstores and trading posts of the Southwest -- Arches, Zion, Montezuma Castle, and Glen Canyon Visitor Center, to name a few.

Now I'm more than halfway through the second volume of the series. This one's on Southeastern cypress swamps, and I think I'll call it The Southern Swamp Explorer.

Between the two Explorer books (above) I got sidetracked writing Illustrating Nature ~ Right-brain Art in a Left-brain World to use in teaching my nature illustration students. That drawing book was a whole new direction for me, with marketing in areas I've never tackled before -- and the results have been astonishing....

Last spring I went with my bud Dan to New Zealand for a month. I spent the rest of the year writing up my notes and journal and sketches into an e-book. It's available as a .pdf, and is full of sketches and photos. It was a blast, and I love it, but it hasn't been a great seller. Of course, I'm not such a great promoter, either.

I love my work. My days are kept interesting by alternating writing and illustrating, watching wildlife out my studio windows, reading, teaching illustration classes and workshops (and all that entails!), working on my clipart collection, watching nature programs on PBS, promoting and distributing my books, filling book orders, and dreaming up ways to take more trips like the one to New Zealand.

My next scheme is launching a career in teaching nature sketching workshops on natural history cruise ships. Now that's a dream job to end all dream jobs. I think. And maybe I'll actually find out for sure. In the meantime, I'll keep drawing swamp critters and playing with the cat. Life is good.