Writing in Restaurants

James Danziger

Cecil Beaton: The Art of the Scrapbook

As one of the 20th century's most important photographers, Cecil Beaton documented lives both famous and quotidian in dozens of scrapbooks now held by Sotheby's London. In the course of his decades-long career as a photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, as well as a British war correspondent, Beaton helped invent the cult of the celebrity image. In these pages, reproduced here for the first time, you will enter a fabulous and surreal party where Tallulah Bankhead rubs shoulders with a bust of Voltaire and a portrait of Stravinsky, and where Beaton's first trip on the Queen Mary coincides with Queen Elizabeth's coronation.

Sharon Finmark, Trevor Waugh, Alwyn Crawshaw

Watercolour for the Absolute Beginner: Great Value with More Than 70 Step-By-Step Exercises

This popular book provides all the information you need to get started in watercolour painting. Full of clear, simple advice and more than 70 step-by-step demonstrations, Watercolour for the Absolute Beginner will teach even the least confident of beginners the skills and techniques needed to start painting. In this easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide, three professional artists explain all the basic watercolour techniques. Top TV artist Alwyn Crawshaw demonstrates the basic techniques including brushstrokes, colour mixing and depicting distance and foreground to get you started in watercolour. Lecturer and Artist Sharon Finmark explains how you can paint realistic figures, covering scale and proportion, mixing convincing skin colours and portraying movement and light effectively. Artist and teacher Trevor Waugh demonstrates techniques for painting animals - domestic, farmyard and wild. Starting with simple animal shapes, Trevor takes you through the rudiments of 3D shapes, tone and colour and the tricks of using foreshortening in your work.

John Howe

Myth and Magic: The Art of John Howe

For the first time ever, a portfolio of illustrated work from the award-winning artist, John Howe, which reveals the breathtaking vision of one of the foremost fantasy artists in the world. Myth and Magic is arranged into six sections, which looks at the books by J.R.R. Tolkien that have inspired John, as well as a fascinating tour through the paintings that he has produced for some of the finest fantasy authors working today. From the beloved painting of Smaug which decorates The Hobbit, his numerous and bestselling calendar illustrations, the world famous "Gandalf" picture, which is synonymous with the HarperCollins one-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings, this large-format hardback will delight fans of Tolkien, and anyone who has been captured by the imagination of the artist who so brilliantly brings to life the literary vision of J.R.R. Tolkien.