Graphic Arts

Our second volume showcasing the work of Graham Humphreys contains almost 100 new paintings, many of them created during the pandemic. With home entertainment playing such a crucial role during the Covid years, Graham found himself busier than ever and with increased focus. From blu-ray reissues to soundtrack LP covers, and book jackets to private commissions, this new work is among the artist’s best yet. Classic horror, independent films, and reimaginings of cult movie posters, it’s all here! All the work featured was painted in the traditional medium of gouache on watercolour paper, using techniques that Graham has refined over his 42 years as a professional illustrator. The book’s title is a nod to the marketing of the famous movie franchise in which Graham was involved.

Read more

Justine Picardie spent years puzzling over the truth about Coco Chanel, peeling away the accretions of romance and lies. Since its publication in 2010, hers has become the definitive Chanel biography. With a new foreword and previously unseen images, this new edition delves even deeper into the life and legacy of this eternally alluring woman.

Coco Chanel was an extraordinary inventor – she conjured up the little black dress, bobbed hair, trousers for women, contemporary chic, best-selling perfumes, and the most successful fashion brand of all time – but she also invented herself, fashioning the myth of her own life with the same dexterity as her couture.

While Chanel was supreme innovator and vendor of all things elegant and beautiful, what lies beneath her own glossy myth is far darker. Throwing new light on her passionate and turbulent relationships, this beautifully constructed portrait gives a fresh and penetrating look at how Coco Chanel made herself into her own most powerful creation.

Justine Picardie brings the mysterious Gabrielle Chanel out of hiding, to celebrate her great achievements. She examines Chanel’s enduring afterlife, as well as her remarkable life, uncovering the consequences of what she covered up, unpicking the seams between truth and legend, yet keeping intact the real fabric of her past.

Read more

• Britain’s industrial age is often perceived through a black-and-white filter as the ‘funereal’ age of coal pollution and bleak working class slums. This catalogue will dispel that perception, demonstrating how the industrial revolution transformed colour, and focus on the central role it played in art, culture and technology
• As opposed to approaches favouring a long history of colour, the catalogue focuses on the second half of the 19th century and argues that this was a crucial chromatic turn, which has been significantly ignored by prominent historians of colour and previous publications
• Several essays in the catalogue offer new research into key chromatic events of the period including the 1862 International Exhibition
• Accompanies an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum from 21 September 2023 to 18 February 2024

Contrary to the monochrome vision of Queen Victoria’s mourning dresses and the coal-polluted streets of Charles Dickens’ London, Victorian Britain was, in fact, a period of new and vivid colours. The Industrial Revolution had transformed the Victorians’ perception of colour and, over the course of the second half of the 19th century, it became the key signifier of modern life.

Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design charts the Victorians’ new attitudes to colour through a multidisciplinary exploration of culture, technology, art and literature. The catalogue explores key ‘chromatic’ moments that inspired Victorian artists and writers to think anew about the materiality of colour. Rebelling against the bleakness of the industrial present, these figures learned from the sacred colours of the past, the sumptuous colours of the Middle East and Japan and looked forward towards the decadent colours that defined the end of the century.

Section 1: Glowing Colour: Introduction; Ruskin and Colour Pedagogy; Turner, Ruskin and the Lure of Venetian Colour; The Colour of the Middle Ages; Unweaving the Rainbow: Nature’s Colours in Art and Fashion; Pretty Plant Photographers or Pioneering Women?; Object in Focus: Hummingbird Necklace by Harry Emanuel;

Section 2: Colour for All: The Aniline Revolution; The International Exhibition of 1862; Object in Focus: Technical Analysis of the Great Bookcase; Sculpture and Race; The Colours of the Ancient Past; Orientalism; Object in Focus: Joseph and his Brethren by Owen Jones; India and Colour;

Section 3: Colour for Colour’s Sake: The Colours of Decadence: Yellow, Green and Blue; Object in Focus: St. Mark’s Venice by James McNeill Whistler; Queering Colour; Object in Focus: Tanagra; Object in Focus: Japanese Boardgame; Loie Fuller.

Read more

Ercol was founded in 1920 at High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire by Italian-born Lucian Ercolani (1888-1976), who came to Britain at the age of 10. Ercol is still going strong todand and the company is still family-owned and run. A gifted designer and an impassioned entrepreneur, Lucian Ercolani was the creative driving force behind Ercol for more than 50 years. The book focuses on the Windsor Range, his supreme creation, a coordinated collection of domestic furniture inspired by the traditional English Windsor Chair. Initally developed towards the end of the Second World War as part of the government’s Utility Scheme, Ercol’s Windsor Contemporary Furniture Family was launced at the Festival of Britain in 1951. A run-away success, it was expanded throughout the 1950s and 60s, encompassing a diverse array of kithcen, dining, living room and bedroom furniture in an appealing and harmonious style. Made from solid wood using a distinctive combination of beech and elm, the Windsor Range married the modern with the vernacular, combining advanced technology with superb craftsmanship. Appealing to a wide audience, including post-war design buffs, collectors, students and anyone interested in interiors, it is lavishly illustrated and attractively designed.

Read more

More than just How To Start Sewing, this book will help you start sewing, keep sewing, and sew better than ever before.

Whether you have been sewing for years, or just starting to learn how to sew, whether you are studying fashion design, or sewing for yourself at home, How To Start Sewing has been designed with you in mind. This is a sewing book you will want to keep beside your sewing machine for reference whether you are learning a technique for the first time, or reminding yourself of a detail you haven’t sewn for a while.

The Perfect Reference Book

For the more experienced sewer, How To Start Sewing is designed for quick reference. Forget trawling multiple books and videos to decipher sewing instructions, sometimes you just want a book that you know you can trust. Use our Table of Contents and Index to get right to the technique that you need. We have focused on the most versatile techniques and explained them step by step with detailed drawings and matching patterns. Use our troubleshooting guides to master your sewing machine, improve your stitch quality and solve recurring issues to raise your sewing skills to the next level.

A Sewing Course in a Book

If you have just started to sew, this book has been designed for you. Learning to sew can be both frustrating and rewarding, so you want a book that will start slowly, build your confidence and help you avoid common problems. Designed as a thorough sewing course, How To Start Sewing will walk you through the entire sewing process, from your first hand sewing stitches to your first complete garment. You don’t even need to have a sewing machine to start learning. Just like having a sewing teacher in your own home or studio, let us show you how to choose and use your first sewing machine, troubleshoot your way through common sewing issues and build your sewing confidence. Go easy on your budget by buying new equipment and materials only as you need it, then put your new supplies and skills to use in hands-on exercises. Don’t let the large size of this book intimidate you; everything is explained in straightforward language with practical examples. No prior experience required.

Practical Sewing Exercises with Patterns to Match

It’s frustrating trying to sew a new detail when your pattern doesn’t match the instructions. So inside this book you’ll find a whole library of small sewing patterns. Trace off the patterns, cut them out in fabric and follow the step-by-step exercises to sew seams, darts, pockets, zippers, vents, and plackets. Then you can create a reference folder full of your favourite techniques. Next time you forget how to sew the lining for an invisible zipper, or how to adjust the tension on your overlocker, you will have your test sample there to remind you. This pattern library is also the perfect reference for when you are pattern cutting your own patterns or amending sewing patterns.

Sew Like a Professional

Professional sewing machinists know where to invest their time and effort to get the best results and you can learn the construction principles at work and achieve a finish worthy of high-end ready-to-wear too. This book focuses on the most versatile garment details used in womenswear and menswear collections for you to apply to your own designs.

Designed for Different Types of Sewers

If you are a perfectionist, this book will suit your pragmatic desire to know everything about the how and why of sewing and build your skills and knowledge in a specific order. Or if you prefer to make mistakes first, and then ask questions later then we are here for you too. Just use our troubleshooting guides to tell you why you keep breaking needles and tangling your thread so you can quickly solve your issues and plough through your first projects. The sooner you start making mistakes, the sooner we can help you fix them.

Read more

Are you looking for the perfect fashion templates to capture your creativity?

Fashionary have seen the stiff, impractical fashion templates available, and come up with a modern alternative. Their set of 100 pose cards are accurately proportioned, with practical poses that cover basic style to couture to sportswear – even including a built-in filing system to accommodate the busy fashion professional.

The guide book includes detailed step by step demonstrations of fashion sketching, beautifully drawn by fashion illustrator Connie Lim.

Read more

Vices or virtues: drinking and smoking provided marketers with products to be forged into visual feasts. In this lush compendium of advertisements, we explore how depictions of these commodities spanned from the elegant to the offbeat, revealing how manufacturers prodded their customers throughout the 20th century to imbibe and inhale.

Each era’s alcohol and tobacco trends are exuberantly captured page after page, with brand images woven into American popular culture so effectively that almost anyone could identify such icons as the Marlboro Man or Spuds MacKenzie, figures so familiar they could appear in ads without the product itself. Other advertisers devised clever and subliminal approaches to selling their wares, as the wildly successful Absolut campaign confirmed. Even doctors contributed to a perverse version of propaganda, testifying that smoking could calm your nerves and soothe your throat, while hailing liquor as an elixir capable of bringing social success.

Whether you savor these visual delights, or enjoy inhaling and wallowing in forbidden pleasures, you will certainly be thrilled by this exploration of a decidedly vibrant―and sometimes controversial―chapter of advertising history.

About the series

TASCHEN is 40! Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible publishing, helping bookworms around the world curate their own library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia at an unbeatable price. Today we celebrate 40 years of incredible books by staying true to our company credo. The 40 series presents new editions of some of the stars of our program―now more compact, friendly in price, and still realized with the same commitment to impeccable production.

Read more

New York Times Bestseller

Nigel Barker—fashion authority, photographer, and host of Oxygen’s The Face—presents 50 of the most influential models from the 1940s to today through a wealth of full-color photographs from the world’s most renowned fashion photographers and an anecdotal text that reveals each woman’s indelible place in the pantheons of fashion and popular culture.

Interweaving 200 gorgeous photographs and informative and entertaining anecdotes, Models of Influence profiles 50 women who have made an unforgettable impression on fashion, the modeling industry, and our notions of beauty. Eight chronological chapters, each of which spotlight an era, feature the stories and images of women who made their mark.

These include Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, Dovima, and Dorian Leigh, who reigned during modeling’s golden age in the 1950s; Twiggy, Veruschka, and Jean Shrimpton, who embodied the free spirit of the 1960s; and Lauren Hutton, Iman, and Janice Dickinson, models who revolutionized the notion of beauty in the 1970s. Barker profiles those who’ve become the million-dollar faces of their time, such as Christie Brinkley and Elle Macpherson; revisits the age of the supermodel, when Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Naomi Campbell rose to global stardom; and spotlights eternal chameleons Kate Moss, Stella Tennant, and Amber Valletta, among others. Also included are models who brought us into the twenty-first century, and those who are leading the way into the future, from Gisele Bündchen, Daria Werbowy, Liya Kebede, and Coco Rocha to Cara Delevingne, Karlie Kloss, Lara Stone, Joan Smalls, and Kate Upton.

Nigel Barker showcases each model’s incandescent style—that special something that sets her apart, whether it’s her unique physicality, a daring approach to image-making, or a particular energy that reflects the zeitgeist. Here, too, are models who broke the mold in their respective eras and turned the standard notion of beauty on its head.

Stunning in its breadth and beauty, comprising some of the finest fashion images over the last 70 years, Models of Influence is a celebration of fashion and a group of unforgettable women who have helped shape and change modern culture.

Read more

An in-depth visual guide presenting the captivating creative journeys behind the world’s leading videogames.

Making Videogames is an unprecedented snapshot of modern interactive entertainment, with insight from true pioneers about the most important games in the world. Illustrated with some of the most arresting in-game images ever seen in print, the book explores the unique alchemy of technical and artistic endeavour that constitutes the magic of videogames, striking a captivating balance between insight and accessibility.

Across eleven chapters, each focusing on a specific game from AAA blockbusters such as Control and Half-Life: Alyx to cult breakthrough games including No Man’s Sky and Return of the Obra Dinn, the book will document the incredible craft of videogame worldbuilding and visual storytelling via the world’s most popular, but seldom fully understood, entertainment medium. The book’s text orbits breathtaking, specially created imagery ‘photographed’ in-engine by the author, demonstrating the magic and method behind each studio’s work.

A book not only for die-hard videogame fanatics, but also for designer-creatives and the visually curious, Making Videogames is a thrilling showcase of the boundless creativity of this amazing industry.

Read more

Learn how to paint on your iPad like the professionals in Beginner’s Guide to Procreate, a comprehensive introduction to this industry-standard software. Accessible and versatile, Procreate is an ideal tool for anyone wanting to give digital painting a go. Step-by-step tutorials, quick tips, and inspiring artwork ensure you’ll have all you need to create stunning concept art quickly and easily.

Read more

David Gentleman has lived in London for almost seventy years, most of it on the same street. This book is a record of a lifetime spent observing, drawing and getting to know the city, bringing together work from across his whole career, from his earliest sketches to watercolours painted just a few months ago.

Here is London as it was, and as it is today: the Thames, Hampstead Heath; the streets, canals, markets and people of his home of Camden Town; and at the heart of it all, his studio and the tools of his work. Accompanied by reflections on the process of drawing and personal thoughts on the ever-changing city, this is a celebration of London, and the joy of noticing, looking and capturing the world.

‘David has spent a lifetime depicting with wit and affection a London he has made his own’ Alan Bennett

‘He delivers a poetry of exultant concentration … The surface fusion of the sensuous and the sharply modern is echoed by Gentleman’s imagery’ Guardian

‘The artist and illustrator has been responsible for some of the most-seen public artworks in this country’ The Times

‘Perhaps the last of the great polymath designer-painters’ Camden New Journal

Read more

Take your creativity to the next level with the ultimate artist’s bible!

Covering everything from how to draw and paint to ceramics, sculptures and printmaking, you’ll get the most out of your passion for art with this beautifully illustrated artist’s handbook. It also includes newer areas such as digital art and animation – perfect for modern artists!

Discover everything you need to help you release the artist within! This essential art book includes:

– All areas of visual art; including drawing, painting, 3D art, printmaking, textiles, and digital arts including photography
– Each section is written by an acknowledged expert in that field – both practising professionals and university-level teachers
– Comprehensive coverage of equipment and tools, including step-by-step sequences, where appropriate on how to use
– Techniques are illustrated in step-by-step sequences by professional artists, with basic skills leading on to more advanced techniques

Whether you’re dipping in to find a specific painting technique or browsing for artistic inspiration, this artist’s reference book covers all the elements of painting and drawing. Brush up on the art basics like choosing the right tool, mixing watercolours, and preparing a canvas. Take your skills further and learn how to glaze a pot, try out 3D printing and mosaic, or create a digital collage.

The Artist’s Manual will help you become a more confident, creative artist. Equipment, materials, and methods are fully explained and beautifully illustrated. Perfect for artists of every skill level, you’ll be creating your own masterpieces in no time with this guide to art. It’s a must-have for every artist’s studio!

Read more

Rich selection of royalty-free motifs from famous British reference. Striking, varied designs suitable for any number of graphic projects. Images include lions, tigers, wreaths, falcons, rosettes, human figures, mythical creatures, crowns, and much more. Add aristocratic flair to book and magazine illustrations, advertisements, newsletters, etc.

Read more

Have you ever been grappling with your creative work, but found yourself hitting a wall?
 
Here’s the thing—sometimes you push through a wall. And sometimes, you need to reset your mind so that you can attack the problem with fresh eyes. That’s where Joke in a Box comes in!

Designed as an at-home version of New Yorker cartoonist Emily Flake’s popular workshop, Joke in a Box will provide a gateway into the craft of joke writing and construction, with modular prompts designed to help you see the world in a more playful and inventive way. Presented with care, empathy, and a sense of joy, this 70-card deck full of exercises and ideas is useful not just to gag writing and drawing, but to any form that speaks to you as a creator. Exercises focus on idea generations techniques such as making lists to force comic juxtapositions, drawing exercises (why not mine your junk mail for visual reference and inspiration!), and encouragement.

Read more