14 books
Felix Scheinberger
Scheinberger’s watercolor book, and it’s aimed at people who’ve been told watercolor is difficult and precious. He isn’t. Color theory taught quickly, a small palette, the mechanics of wet-on-wet and glazing, how to keep whites, how to fix a mess,…
Nick Pope
Two days after Christmas 1980, security police at the twin American air bases at Bentwaters and Woodbridge in Suffolk saw lights come down in the pines between them and went out to look. Jim Penniston says he walked up to…
Thomas Elpel
No book is going to teach you botany in a day — you have to get down on your knees and go face to face with the flora. But this one gets you further in an afternoon than any field…
David Darlington
Darlington went out to Rachel, Nevada, in the mid-nineties and hung around long enough to write the book about the people, not the saucers. The base is real and the history is straight: The CIA built it in the fifties…
Gabriel Campanario
The buildings volume, and the one that fixes the most common wreck. Perspective without the textbook: finding eye level, one and two vanishing points, how to draw a street that runs uphill, how to fake a crowd of windows without…
Bill Broyles
El Camino del Diablo runs across the driest corner of the Sonoran Desert, and for centuries the only reliable water on it was Tinajas Altas — a stack of natural rock basins in a granite ravine, filled by the rare…
Michel Pastoureau
Green was hard to make and harder to keep. The dye wouldn’t hold — it faded, it shifted, it wouldn’t sit still on cloth — and medieval guilds kept the blue dyers and the yellow dyers separate by law, so…
Róisín
People are the thing that stops most sketchers cold. They move, and everybody already knows what a person is supposed to look like, so the errors show. Curé’s fix is to start with proportion and then get you drawing fast…
Emily St. John Mandel
An actor dies onstage during King Lear in Toronto on the night a flu arrives that will kill almost everybody. Twenty years later the Traveling Symphony walks a circuit around the Great Lakes performing Shakespeare for the settlements that are…
Peter Heller
Jim Stegner is a painter with a real market, two dead marriages, a daughter who was murdered, and a prison term for shooting a man in a bar. He’s living in Colorado trying to fish and paint and stay level.…
