Drawing Ambience


Book Description

Drawing Ambience showcases a selection of drawings from the personal collection of the noted architectural educator Alvin Boyarsky (1928-1990). As chairman of the Architectural Association (AA) in London (1971-1990), Boyarsky accumulated an impressive collection of drawings at a time when the AA produced an extraordinary program of exhibitions and publications rooted in drawing not only as a representational medium but also a form of architecture in its own right. Boyarsky s drawing collection emerged at the confluence of modernism, postmodernism, and other cultural currents worldwide, capturing the work of artists and architects such as Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, John Hejduk, Daniel Libeskind, Mary Miss, OMA, Eduardo Paolozzi, Superstudio, Shin Takamatsu, Bernard Tschumi, and Peter Wilson. The publication features a full-length essay situating Boyarsky s collection in the emergence of architecture as a global discursive discipline as well as close analysis of fifty of the most imaginative, visionary drawings in it. Exquisite reproductions of each of the featured drawings and prints, along with portfolios of limited-edition publications from the AA, are supplemented by close-up and microscopic images, providing an unprecedented opportunity to explore the imaginative spirit of drawing practices central to the magnetic web of conversations in the architectural discourse, both historical and contemporary, including the discipline s renewed interest in the hand as it relates to drawing and making. "




Ambient Literature


Book Description

This book considers how a combination of place-based writing and location responsive technologies produce new kinds of literary experiences. Building on the work done in the Ambient Literature Project (2016–2018), this books argues that these encounters constitute new literary forms, in which the authored text lies at the heart of an embodied and mediated experience. The visual, sonic, social and historic resources of place become the elements of a live and emergent mise-en-scène. Specific techniques of narration, including hallucination, memory, history, place based writing, and drama, as well as reworking of traditional storytelling forms combine with the work of app and user experience design, interaction, software authoring, and GIS (geographical information systems) to produce ambient experiences where the user reads a textual and sonic literary space. These experiences are temporary, ambiguous, and unpredictable in their meaning but unlike the theatre, the gallery, or the cinema they take place in the everyday shared world. The book explores the potentiality of a new literary form produced by the exchange between location-aware cultural objects, writers and readers. This book, and the work it explores, lays the ground for a new poetics of situated writing and reading practices.




Art Journal Freedom


Book Description

Art Journal Color! Art Journal Composition! Art Journal Freedom! Color is all around us and we often find ourselves drawn to particular combinations or arrangements. But how can you effectively and artistically capture those eye-catching compositions in your art journal? It's true, art journaling has no "rules" and is a safe place for free expression of your one-of-a-kind life. But knowledge is power and knowing the "rules" of color and composition gives you the freedom to use and break them willfully to create the effects you want. Dina shares these principles in a fun and approachable way with dozens upon dozens of unique journal pages to show you just some of the many possibilities. Inside You Will Find: • Lessons and tips about composition and color including dominance and repetition, symmetry, contrast and the power of black and white. • 10 step-by-step technique demonstrations. • Dozens of color and design tips and page challenges.




The Art of City Sketching


Book Description

The Art of City Sketching: A Field Manual guides you through the laborious and sometimes complex process of sketching what you see in the built environment so that you can learn to draw what you imagine. Illustrated with hundreds of drawings by students and professionals of cityscapes around Europe and the United States, the book helps you develop your conceptual drawing skills so that you can communicate graphically to represent the built environment. Short exercises, projects, drawing tips, step-by-step demonstrations, and composition do's and don'ts make it easy for you to get out into the city and experiment in your own work. Author Michael Abrams uses his experience as a field sketching instructor, to show you that by drawing, you can discover, analyze, and comprehend the built environment.




The Art of City Sketching


Book Description

The Art of City Sketching: A Field Manual guides readers through the process of freehand architectural sketching and explains orthographic, diagrammatic, three-dimensional, and perceptual-type drawings. The book presents hundreds of drawings of historic buildings and urban spaces, examples, and exercises, which help readers develop their drawing skills and employ sketching as an analytical tool. The book is divided into three parts, based on the reader’s skill level: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. As an architect and field sketching instructor, the author shows that through drawing the reader can discover, analyze, and comprehend the built environment. The new edition of The Art of City Sketching expands on the drawing techniques of the previous version by adding new drawing examples, exercises, and two new chapters—Chiaroscuro and Storyboard. New drawing tips, demonstrations, and composition "do’s and don’ts" will support readers when they illustrate their viewpoint of the city by using simple drawing tools. The lessons in this book will allow readers to mix method with imagination and sensibility.




Mediated Messages


Book Description

Mediated Messages presents a collection of original writing exploring the role played by the media in the development of postmodern architecture in the 1970s and 80s. The book's twelve chapters and case-studies examine a range of contemporary periodicals and exhibitions to explore their role in the postmodern. This focus on mediation as a key feature of architectural post-modernism, and the recognition that post-modernism grew out of developments in the media, opens up the possibility of an important new account of post-modernism distinct from existing narratives. Accompanied by a contextualizing introduction, the essays are arranged across four thematic sections (covering: images; international postmodernisms; high and low culture; and postmodern architects as theorists) and present a range of case-studies with a genuinely international scope. Altogether, this work makes a substantial contribution to the historical account of architectural postmodernism, and will be of great interest to researchers in postmodernism as well as those examining the role of the media in architectural history.







Zen of Drawing


Book Description

Zen of Drawing inspires you to pick up a pen, pencil or an iPad and start drawing what you see with a 'zen' approach. Author Peter Parr has spent his career in animation successfully teaching people to draw and encouraging students to nurture their skills through observational drawing. He advocates a fresh way of looking closely at your subject and enlisting an emotional response, in order to fully appreciate the nature of what you are about to draw. You will learn that whatever you are drawing, it is essential not only to copy its outline but also to ask yourself: is it soft, smooth or rough to the touch? How heavy is it? Is it fragile or solid? Then, having grasped the fundamental characteristics, or zen, of the object, make corresponding marks on the paper – crisp textures, a dense wash, a scratchy or floating line. The chapters cover: keeping a sketchbook; tools (pen, pencil, charcoal, watercolour and iPad); perspective; line and volume; tone and texture; structure and weight; movement and rhythm; energy, balance and composition.




A Proven Strategy for Creating Great Art


Book Description

Dan McCaw is one of America's most respected artists, and with this book he reveals his oil-painting approach for creating great art, from thumbnail ideas to finishing touches. Readers will gain an understanding on the principles of light, the two basic ways to design a painting, an explanation of colour, his 5-stage development process, the art of seeing, outdoor painting, troubleshooting, and ways to broaden their thinking. Full-length, step-by-step demonstrations with generous captions, examples and explanatory sidebars ensure its value as a teaching aid for artists of all levels of ability.




Engaging Ambience


Book Description

Engaging Ambience is an in-depth exploration of contemporary rhetorical theory, drawing from rich traditions of visual and sensory research. It is the first book to develop comprehensive empirical approaches to ambient rhetoric and the first to offer systematic approaches to visual research in studies of rhetoric and writing. These approaches address the complexities of everyday life and offer practical advice for understanding the factors that shape individuals and communities, how they understand one another, and the kind of world they envision. By articulating theoretically sound methodologies and methods for the empirical study of rhetoric conceived as originary, immanent, and enveloping, Brian McNely contributes a methodological perspective that furthers new materialist theories of rhetoric. McNely demonstrates how scholars’ emergent theories of rhetoric call for new methodologies that can extend their reach, and in the process, he proposes a new conception of visual rhetoric. Engaging Ambience delineates methodologies and methods that help researchers in rhetoric and writing studies discover the ambient environments that condition and support everyday communication in all its forms. Engaging Ambiencedetails and demonstrates visual and multisensory methodologies and methods for exploring the wondrous complexity of everyday communication. It will appeal to scholars and students of rhetorical theory, visual and multisensory rhetorics, and composition and writing studies.




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