Artful Animals

Explores the idea that our aesthetic responses and art behaviors are connected to our evolved human nature reaching back hundreds of thousands of years to our humanoid ancestors. Examines human aesthetic interest in animals, decouples human beauty from mate selection, and weighs the arts as biological, social, or mixed adaptations.

Animal art in no time at all? Yes, please! Get ready to upcycle everyday items into wild creations. Follow along with simple instructions and step-by-step images for fast fun making a soda bottle shark, a hoot roll owl, and more. Designed to easily fit into an active classroom session or library visit, it's easy to turn trash to treasure with Crafts in a Snap!

Join the flock! Create your own aviary of charming, beautifully detailed, one-of-a-kind fabric bird sculptures with basic machineand handsewing, embroidery, and mixed-media craft techniques. The Artful Bird presents 16 incredibly charming, quirky, personality-filled birds for you to make! Through a detailed chapter of step-by-step basic birdmaking techniques and tips, you will not only learn to make these cute creatures, but also discover how to craft your own patterns for almost any bird--real or imagined. Inside you'll also find Glassenberg's creative ideas to give each bird individual character and personality, from using paint and glitter to adding collage elements. Plus, check out an international gallery of birds from other noted fabric bird makers for more inspiration!

Rand McNally's Artful Animals Dot-to-Dot features more than 30 of the world's most beautiful creatures. With an average of 850 dots per illustration, these sophisticated puzzles are challenging, fun, and engaging for all ages. More than 30 amazing puzzles of creatures from around the globe, including fun and interesting facts about them. Product Features: More than 30 amazing, elaborate creatures and habitats from around the globe Includes nine two-page spreads High-quality paper reduces marker bleed-through Solution pages at the back reveal completed pictures and provide details Perfect for adults and teens as well as kids Dimensions: 8.375" x 10.625" Black and white Perfect bound binding

Once seen as a collection of artifacts and ritual objects, African art now commands respect from museums and collectors. Bennetta Jules-Rosette and J.R. Osborn explore the reframing of African art through case studies of museums and galleries in the United States, Europe, and Africa. The authors take a three-pronged approach. Part One ranges from curiosity cabinets to virtual websites to offer a history of ethnographic and art museums and look at their organization and methods of reaching out to the public. In the second part, the authors examine museums as ecosystems and communities within communities, and they use semiotic methods to analyze images, signs, and symbols drawn from the experiences of curators and artists. The third part introduces innovative strategies for displaying, disseminating, and reclaiming African art. The authors also propose how to reinterpret the art inside and outside the museum and show ways of remixing the results. Drawing on extensive conversations with curators, collectors, and artists, African Art Reframed is an essential guide to building new exchanges and connections in the dynamic worlds of African and global art.

Thousands of years after man first recorded his impressions of animals on cave walls, artists are still attempting to reproduce images of these incredibly diverse creatures of land, sea, and air. This book by an award-winning artist is designed to aid painters at all skill levels to draw and paint wildlife with precision and accuracy. Award-winning artist Fredric Sweney begins by using the horse as the basis for understanding the physical structure of animals, while the wild duck serves as the model for the configuration, wing construction, and flight characteristics of birds. More than 260 illustrations, along with step-by-step details, make it easier and more enjoyable than ever to paint a Noah's Ark of dogs, cats, oxen, deer, bears, birds, goats, and more exotic animals--in every size and shape. An invaluable guide to zoological anatomy, ideal for beginners as well as advanced artists, this complete, practical reference will also serve as an excellent resource for resolving commonplace problems of artistic composition.

Traditional fine arts are often regarded as rarefied, something accessed by the uniquely talented and displayed in impressive museums or on lavish stages. Art thusly conceived is something that most people never practice in their lives. Yet in day-to-day life we all experience creative satisfaction through interaction with the physical and social environment that is a form of artistic practice. In Transformative Arts: Biological, Digital, and Everyday Aesthetics, Gary A. Berg explores what we gain through understanding ways to live imaginative lives and considers the increasingly important collaborative role of computers and interaction with nature.

Choreographies of the Living explores the implications of shifting from viewing art as an exclusively human undertaking to recognizing it as an activity that all living creatures enact. Carrie Rohman reveals the aesthetic impulse itself to be profoundly trans-species, and in doing so she revises our received wisdom about the value and functions of artistic capacities. Countering the long history of aesthetic theory in the West--beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and moving up through the recent claims of "neuroaesthetics"--Rohman challenges the likening of aesthetic experience to an exclusively human form of judgment. Turning toward the animal in new frameworks for understanding aesthetic impulses, Rohman emphasizes a deep coincidence of humans' and animals' elaborations of fundamental life forces. Examining a range of literary, visual, dance, and performance works and processes by modernist and contemporary figures such as Isadora Duncan, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Merce Cunningham, Rohman reconceives the aesthetic itself not as a distinction separating humans from other animals, but rather as a framework connecting embodied beings. Her view challenges our species to acknowledge the shared status of art-making, one of our most hallowed and formerly exceptional activities.

This technique-filled workshop for creating soft toys, with 16 projects and 52 lessons, covers everything from the basics to advanced construction elements.