Sunday 21 May 2017

Review: Art Life - Bev Speight

Art Life is an invitation to take a creative journey - making your own fantastic art along the way. This is a completely original way to unleash your creativity, with an engaging structure based around four distinct categories for exploring ideas - line, book, traces, and marks. For each of these there are numerous projects and accessible methods for creating art, and you are encouraged to try whatever inspires you, without pressure or any preconceptions. Enjoy the element of surprise and satisfaction in creating something that evolves, rather than following a rigid plan. You will be amazed by what you can achieve.

Introducing work in every conceivable medium with sensational art and new photos, this book will let you enjoy the creative process, relax, and enjoy the art escape.

Visit the Bev Speight's website for more information

Review:
Art Life isn't an instruction manual and it doesn't give you in depth instructions on how to complete different art projects. Instead what it aims to do is inspire you to try out new techniques and experiment with art in a way you might never have tried before. You don't need to be a professional artist to take inspiration from this book, Bev Speight has focused on ideas that can be achieved fairly easily and in most cases using items you probably already have in your home and garden. You won't need to buy a huge amount of expensive equipment to get started but I think flicking through the pages will leave you eager to get experimenting.

The book is split into 4 different journeys, the first is Line which focuses on taking inspiration from your surroundings, making drawings from one continuous line which you could the go on to recreate using wire or string and things like creating geometric designs using different coloured tape.



Journey two is Book and this was probably my favourite section of all because it focuses on creating art out of old books which is something I already love doing. There are just so many ways you can cut or fold book pages to create sculptures and I'm definitely looking forward to experimenting more using ideas I've seen in this book.



Journey Three is called Traces and it's all about leaving your mark, be that in paint with homemade brushes using bits of twig or feathers or by creating your own blocks to use as prints, you could even experiment with ink or coffee or wine rather than paint. This section is all about texture and thinking outside the box, give yourself the freedom to experiment and remember that you don't always have to use normal paint brushes when fingers or toes or the sole of an old shoe might work even better.



The final journey is Paper which focuses on making collages and experimenting with different types of paper. Cut out facial features from magazines and mix them up in unusual ways or take a single image, cut it into strips and rearrange the pieces to distort the picture. Play around with different shapes and colours and just see what you can come up with.


If the author's goal is to inspire people to go out and try new things then I'd say she's achieved that 100%. Flicking through this book gave me so many ideas and there are things I'd never have thought about trying otherwise. I can't wait to get started!

Source: Received from Amazon Vine in exchange for an honest review

Other Reviews:
If you have reviewed this book on your blog please leave a link to your review in the comments & I'll add the link here.

Paperback / Kindle:

No comments:

Post a Comment

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails