Tien Chiu

Access the healing power of art through guided meditation, collage prompts, and artist stories to connect to, and express, your deepest emotions. Use this compassionate guide to access your deepest emotions, express them through art, and transform them into tools for healing and understanding. Former psychotherapist turned artist Andy Stanton offers guided meditations, imagery techniques, and collage prompts to open a safe space for not only grief and brokenheartedness, but celebration and thankfulness. First, follow relaxation and imagery techniques to access your feelings. Next, use the simple guidelines for making collage art. Inspiring us by example, dozens of contemporary artists offer photographs of their most personally transformative artworks and share heartfelt stories about how those pieces helped them alleviate their difficult emotions. Focusing on the emotional-artistic process rather than specific skill, Stanton offers lessons for artists of all experience levels and mediums. An exclusive online bonus feature offers dozens more artworks and stories.

This book outlines a powerful process for designing and creating beautiful work that is practical to make and sell. Perspectives from 22 master artisans fuse with industrial product design techniques and the author’s own craftwork experience, focusing sharp insight on the process of creating original work. To use this book, begin with its suggestions for gathering ideas, brainstorming designs, and committing to an ambitious new project. Next, follow the supplied framework for evaluating, changing, and critiquing your work. Apply the book’s design guidelines to make your work more visually powerful, useful, and simple to create. Finally, use this guide’s advice to grow as an artisan: Find your voice, develop your skills, sell your work, and (if you want) make craftwork a career. Packed with insights from glassworkers, ceramicists, woodworkers, fiber artists, metalworkers, and more, it provides a solid framework to build on for craftspeople who want to produce spectacular work.