Keys to Drawing with Imagination

Strategies and exercises for gaining confidence and enhancing your natural creativity.

Bert Dodson, author of the best-selling Keys to Drawing, is back with fun techniques and mind-stretching strategies to get you drawing better and more imaginatively than you ever have before. In every section, he offers you basic guidelines that help you channel your creative energies in the right direction. Before you know it, you will lose yourself in the process, enjoying the experience as you create something gratifying and worthwhile.

The subjects covered in this hands-on book are as vast as the imagination itself. Through 58 strategies, 36 exercises and 13 step-by-step demonstrations, you will explore how to:

• Take your doodling from mindless to masterful
• Create your own reality by crumbling, melting or breaking objects
• Flip the familiar on its ear to create something utterly original
• Experiment with visual paradox and metaphor
• Tell vivid stories through the details in your drawings
• Play with patterns to create captivating compositions
• Build your drawings by borrowing ideas from different cultures
• Develop a theme in your work

Along the way, Dodson offers you priceless advice on the creative process culled from his 60 years of drawing and teaching. For additional inspiration and encouragement, he includes the work of 30 other outstanding artists. So what are you waiting for? Grab this book and start drawing! You will be amazed at what you can create.

Click here to see sample pages from "Keys to Drawing with Imagination"

Keys to Drawing

Through his years of teaching, Bert Dodson has developed an approach to drawing that has proven to be remarkably successful for all his students—even those who doubted their own ability to learn to draw. It's based on 55 "keys to drawing," and in this book youll learn how to use these keys to sharpen your observation skills and improve your drawing ability.

Dodson's keys are rules that don't need to be memorized but realized and he presents them at a comfortable pace, interspersed between practice exercises that help you learn by doing. These exercises (or "projects" as Dodson calls them) are narrowly focused to take you one step at a time; some specifically call for unusual views of objects or exaggerated perspective, but all are integral parts of the larger process of becoming a better artist.

Youll learn such helpful concepts as restating, focusing, mapping, and intensifying; how to free youi hand action, then learn to control it to produce the desired results; how to convey the illusions of light, depth, and texture; and how to stimulate your imagination through "creative playing'.'

At the end of each chapter, youll find a review highlighting key points and a self-evaluation form on which you can record your progress.

Put your previous drawing problems behind you and start fresh with this logical, inviting approach. By following Dodson's instructions, youll be able to draw with skill and confidence!

The Way Life Works

Where did life come from — and how does it work? How can the union of a single sperm and regg become a five-trillion-cell baby? How can plants turn sunshine into food? How does the secret language of DNA, with only four letters in its alphabet, spell out instructions for every species on earth? Did birds evolve from dinosaurs? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? (Yes, you'll find the answer inside.)

If you look beyond appearances and delve into the microscopic world, you will discover how much all life has in common. The Hay Life Works celebrates that unity.

This highly original book takes you on a guided tour of the many ways all life grows, develops, reproduces itself, and gets along. Distinguished scientist Mahlon Hoagland and dazzling illustrator Ben Dodson. your tour guides, merge science and art through the expert, often amusing intertwining of text and illustration. Their mind-stretching analogies, trenchant explanations, and rich visual presentations encourage the reader to make imaginative leaps from the panoramic world around us to the world within the cefl and back again.

What do a herd of musk oxen, a baby's skin, a cell membrane, a tree's bark, and the earth's atmosphere have in common? What do car headlights have to do with evuintkmary theory? Why is a firefly's tail like a Manhattan skyline? What links brainstorms, the final act in The Marriage of Figaro, cancer, and an adrenaline rush? Why are bronchial tubes designed like pinecooes. daisies, and seashells? Are you more closely related to the pig. snail, or lizard?

The answers to these and dozens of other thought-provoking questions are fascinating examples of life's hidden unity. AD living creatures are connected to one another and to their predecessors — all the way back to a probable single beginning, some four billion years ago.

This book, capturing so brilliantly the wonders and mysteries of life, will leave you longing to know even more.

Mahlon Hoagland, M.D., a noted molecular biologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, is best known as discoverer of amino acid activating enzymes and codiscoverer of transfer RNA, components of life's machinery for translating the information in DNA into the substance of life. He has written three books about science for the public and a regular newspaper column, "Simply Science." He lives in Thetford, Vermont

Co-author Bert Dodson has illustrated over eighty books and written or co-written six books.