Imaginative Realism

I’ve been waiting to tell you the good news: This September Andrews McMeel Publishing will be releasing a book that I have written based on this blog.

I was waiting to tell you until the cover was finalized. It just came in! Here’s what the book looks like. The book is called Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist. It’s a big book: 224 pages, 400 illustrations. Andrews McMeel will be doing a beautiful job of production, and they are keeping the price down to $24.99.

This is the main project I’ve been working on during the last year. The material comes from my art school lectures and also from this blog. The reason I wrote the book—and this blog—is that there’s a lot of information that I think is crucial to imaginative picturemaking but I’ve never been able to find it in how-to art books.

Adapting material from a blog into a book turned out to be a much, much bigger job than I first imagined. They’re two different animals, though I tried to keep some of the blog’s informal and practical tone.

A lot of the material in the book has never before been published and hasn’t even been seen on this blog.

The spark for doing the book grew out of a discussion on this very blog a year ago last February, where you all shared profound insights about what you liked in an art book. I have learned so much from you all, and I hope you’ll see that reflected in the book.

I’ll tell you more about Imaginative Realism in future posts.