Mixed Media

1,000 Artist Journal Pages: Personal Pages and Inspirations (1000 Series)

My Secret: A PostSecret Book (Postsecret)

At the beginning of 2005, Frank Warren launched a new blog called PostSecret as an experiment in community art, inviting strangers to mail him anonymous postcards that made art out of their innermost secrets and then posting a selection of the cards every week on his blog. Within a year, his blog was one of the five most popular in the world, and his first book, PostSecret, was one of the surprise bestsellers of 2005. My Secret is his second book, a collection of cards from teens and college students--none of which has been shown on the website--that carries the same emotional power and creativity that have made Warren's project a phenomenon.

We are featuring seven postcards from the book here: see two of them on this page, and click on the numbers below to see five more.

Click on the numbers below to see five more postcards from My Secret

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Postsecret.com founder Frank Warren is back with a fresh and compelling companion to his wildly popular Los Angeles Times bestseller, PostSecret. For My Secret, a collectible, paper-over-board book that includes a page of vibrant, decorative stickers, Warren has personally selected never-before-seen anonymous postcards created by teens and college students from across the country. Each card bears an intimate and powerful secret—at turns inspirational, shocking, hilarious, and poetic—that is told through original illustrations, photographs, collages, and other creative means. Sample messages include:

• "I am avoiding you because you are socially below me."
• "I know the truth to the lie my parents tell... "
• "My friends think I was homeschooled. I spent high school in juvi."

A unique and important book that will appeal to both young adults and their parents, My Secret offers a raw and revealing glimpse into the real lives of today's teens and twentysomethings. Choosing their own handmade postcards over email or text messages, teens and college students express their hopes, fears, and wildest confessions in a way that truly represents their diverse personalities and voices.

Creating Characters with Personality: For Film, TV, Animation, Video Games, and Graphic Novels

• Character design is the key in many industries—and they're all covered in this book

• Practical step-by-step exercises

• Contributors include Glen Keane, Supervising Animator, Disney

From Snow White to Shrek, from Fred Flintstone to SpongeBob Square-Pants, the design of a character conveys personality before a single word of dialogue is spoken. Creating Characters with Personality shows artists how to create a distinctive character, then place that character in context with a script, establish hierarchy, and maximize the impact of pose and expression. Practical exercises help readers put everything together to make their new characters sparkle. Lessons from the author, who designed the dragon Mushu (voiced by Eddie Murphy) in Disney's Mulan—plus big-name experts in film, TV, video games, and graphic novels—make a complex subject accessible to every artist.

Fabric Art Workshop: Exploring Techniques & Materials for Fabric Artists and Quilters

True Vision: Authentic Art Journaling

Mixed-Media Self-Portraits: Inspiration & Techniques

Pretty Little Things: Collage Jewelry, Trinkets and Keepsakes

Whimsical and Elegant Projects from Well-Known Collage Artist Sally Jean Alexander

*Shares 27 projects with 30 variations for additional inspiration
*Uses vintage ephemera to create charms, vials, miniature shrines, and reliquary boxes
*Features author Sally Jean Alexander's signature style

With Pretty Little Things, readers will find collage projects that exhibit a playful air and a sense of magic. The twenty-seven projects and thirty variations feature vintage ephemera soldered within glass, for finished works that tell a romantic or whimsical story. All exhibit Sally Jean Alexander's signature style--a style that brings new life to antique papers, vintage photographs, found projects, scavenged text, and more.

Mixed-Media Mosaics: Techniques and Projects Using Polymer Clay Tiles, Beads & Other Embellishments

Great crossover potential--introduces a fresh creative medium and process for mixed-media, collage, assemblage, polymer clay and mosaic tile artists.

Project variety--along with more familiar surfaces (like tables and mirrors), mosaic work is introduced in refreshingly new formats, such as jewelry and shrines.

Features an extensive techniques section and 18 step-by-step demos designed to be accessible to all skill levels.

Mixed Media Mosaics uses polymer-clay, mosaic-tile work as a new and exciting platform for mixed-media/collage artists. Readers will learn to craft highly textural and vividly colored icons, boxes, tables, items of personal adornment and more, using a combination of manufactured tiles and handmade tiles. Techniques for creating the tiles include painting and glazing, stamping, embedding items like beads and buttons, mixing pigments and mica powders with clay, adding metallic leaf, creating molds, combining the handcrafted tiles with traditional mosaic tile, grout alternatives and more. In addition to learning techniques for making their own tiles, readers will discover helpful processes for working inspiration (such as an homage to a loved one or a memorable getaway) into their tile-work, using personalization techniques such as stamping words or adding personal ephemera and found objects.

Digital Art (World of Art)

Digital technology has had a major impact on the production and experience of art during the past decade and a half. Not only have traditional forms of art such as printing, painting, photography, and sculpture been transformed by digital techniques and media, but entirely new forms such as net art, software art, digital installation, and virtual reality have emerged as recognized practices, collected by major museums, institutions, and private collectors the world over.

Christiane Paul surveys digital art from its appearance in the early 1990s up to the present day. Drawing a distinction between work that uses digital technology as a tool to produce traditional forms and work that uses it as a medium to create new types of art, she discusses all the key artists and works. The book explores themes addressed by and raised by the art, such as viewer interaction, artificial life and intelligence, political and social activism, networks, and telepresence, as well as issues such as the collection, presentation, and preservation of digital art, the virtual museum, and ownership and copyright. 180 illustrations, 100 in color.

Altered Curiosities: Assemblage Techniques and Projects

Featuring techniques for assemblage and surface alterations never before seen in a mixed-media art book (kit-bashing, wiring, egg-shell texture, casting and more), Altered Curiosities offers a new twist on a hot topic.

A fresh variety of projects (such as hair barrettes, jewelry, a drawer pull and a bird feeder) prove that artistic assemblage and collage styles can be expressed beyond wall art.

Readers will learn a new storytelling approach to their mixed-media art. Altered Curiosities goes beyond construction techniques to help readers discover how to create a personal narrative with objects and visually tell a story, not just infuse a piece with meaning or symbolism.

Two very important things make this book stand out from the crowd of other collage, mixed-media and assemblage titles: the projects (full of oddities and the unexpected) and the techniques--several of which have never been published before. A common element of Jane Wynn's style is to find an object, break it and put it together again (sometimes more than once), and she loves using anthropomorphic associations to tell stories in her projects. Step by step, readers will learn her unique method and her sought-after techniques. Along with surface alterations (faux-aging, patinas and the use of unusual household products) Altered Curiosities teaches metal etching with rubber stamps, simple wiring to create dramatic lighting, instruction for altering simple toy figures (making two-headed animals, for instance) and more.