Book Review: Living the Creative Life

The book is by Rice Freeman-Zachary. There are a lot of things that I like about this book. It has nice color pages. The book is rather compact. Pages are smooth and shiny. I like how the pictures are done. The layout is done rather nicely. The one complaint I would have about the formatting is that the print is rather small for me. I can see how people with bad eyesight (like me) would have a problem reading this book. Of course, that is not the fault of the author.


Something that might be rather OT, has anyone noticed that the price of art books has been getting more expensive? This is a paperback book with about 140 pages total and it retails for $22.99. It is about 8x8" book. I am not saying that this specific book is not worth the money, but I have been noticing that trend. Not all art or crafts books (in my opinion) are not worth the escalating prices. Thank you for amazon.com. Otherwise, I might not be able to afford the majority of these books. There is a book that is about to come out soon that is going to retail for $48 and is being pre-sold for $40 (plus S&H probably). That price seems rather steep to me. Here is the link to it, if you want to take a look. http://tinyurl.com/2mxw8e It is called
Making Connections by Susan Lenart Kazmer and Nina Graci. It is a handbook about cold joining for artists and jewelers. It is something that I do and would like to learn more about but I am debating whether I will buy it because of the cost. Richard Salley's stuff is supposed to be in there and he is GOOD at what he does. I just took a workshop with him.



Back to Rice's book - At first flip-through, I just looked at all the art. What I really enjoyed about this book is that there is a variety of artwork in here. She included a variety of artists who specialize in different things. The artist's pict next to their bio was a nice touch. I like to see what people look like. Michael deMeng and Claudine Hellmuth are in here. I am particularly groovin' on Scott Radke's puppets. The pictures are nice quality. Not as large as I would like but they are large enough for you to see the detail. The content is very interesting. It was just a little hard to read. Throughout the book, there is something called "Try this" and "tips" - great idea but I could not always read it. The background sometimes interfered with the words so I could not make out all the words or made it hard to read for me. Let me know if you had a problem with it. Near the end, there was a section about the business end of art - if you want to make it your career. Very interesting information and things to think about there.



Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I only had a problem with some of the small print and how some backgrounds made it harder to read the text. This book is a keeper for me. Let me know what you think!