Irene Brady

Illustrating Nature: Right-brain Art in a Left-brain World is the secret doorway to realistic drawing -- open this book and find the kind of instruction that you've always wanted. Even if nature isn't your all-time hot interest, the bountiful illustrations, generous tips, and step-by-step tutorials focusing on natural objects you can find anywhere, anytime, will give you a jump-start on any other type of subject you choose, from still-life compositions to action figures to landscapes. This book sets you off on a trail of adventure -- and who knows where it will lead! Dive into this book to discover how you can make your pencil do what you tell it to do. Use your new-found skills to improve your paintings, sketch in your field journal, design and illustrate your own business or greeting cards, or create a home school curriculum for your kids -- whatever you desire. This book is for ages 13 and up -- from college students and art-loving teens, to adults looking for a new career or simply wanting to develop their creative skills. Written by an award-winning nature book author and college-level instructor in scientific illustration, the text is superbly crafted to make sense to the creative person of any age. Here are some of the amazing things you can do with this book: - Improve the connections between your creative right brain and your organized left brain to create a stunning working partnership. You'll be astonished at the things you can do. - Discover techniques of observing a subject, so that you can transmit instructions through your hand and pencil to the paper with accuracy, speed and style. - Learn how to sketch living, moving animals using multiple working sketches and additive techniques to achieve vibrant finished drawings. - Explore tricks that will enable you to draw fur, scales, wood, feathers, wrinkles, hair fuzz, and other textures found in nature and elsewhere. - See shadows and shading the way the professional artist does, and learn how to give your drawings three-dimensional depth with shadows and highlights. - Master the mysteries of design to create handsome and interesting drawings, displays, and posters -- anything you want. - Learn how to use a computer graphics program to improve your artwork in ways that would be difficult or impossible by hand. - Work your way through a hands-on, step-by-step computer scan of your artwork, including guidelines for combining graphic files with text to produce publishable artwork. - Understand techniques and ways to critique, fine-tune and improve your own art when you don't have an unbiased expert or teacher to help you out. Find a whole new artistic consciousness within yourself -- and a great deal more -- in this sturdy book with a stay-open binding, designed for easy use.

Here's a fascinating fact/fiction book for all ages, about canyon life of the Southwest. Illustrated with more than 280 drawings, you will see this redrock canyon from the viewpoint of the wildlife as they go about their everyday lives. Beginning with a coyote carrying home dinner to its family, you trot down the canyon trail, watched by a mother vulture keeping her eggs warm in a nearby cave. One of the eggs is hatching, and you watch as the chick emerges.... The illustrated story reads like good fiction, following the lives of the mammals, birds, insects, reptiles and plants and their closely interconnected lives in a desert canyon. You'll experience a flash flood through the eyes of a desert cottontail and drink at the canyon potholes with a mule deer. Feed your owl chicks in an Ancient Puebloan dwelling, and protect your spider eggs in an old cracked Anasazi cooking pot. You'll experience what an ordinary day is like for forty-three different creatures, from mourning dove and canyon wren to bighorn sheep and mountain lion, as well as such oddities as spadefoot toad, collared lizard, kangaroo rat and yucca moth. Illustrations show everything from tracks and skulls and animal behavior to petrified sand dunes and dinosaur footprints. You'll find maps and the geology of all the popular parks and monuments; hiking and camping advice; and an entertaining, low-impact Things-To-Do section. A table of contents and an extensive index make it quick and easy to look things up.

Describes the various parenting techniques of different types of wild animals and provides a close look at the behavior and characteristics of their offspring.

A young girl finds that the injured, disheveled pony she buys out of pity at an auction is really the black stallion of her dreams.

As the two new-born beaver kits Cassie and Paddle enter the world they are welcomed by their mother's soft crooning coo and gentle grooming. Limited at first to the interior of their stick-and-mud lodge, it isn't long before they are curiously exploring the underwater tunnels and deep waters of the beaver pond. As the kits' instincts take hold and they follow their parents example they begin to help collect and store food, repair the dam, and recognize the warning signs for danger. When heavy spring rains destroy both their lodge and the dam, Cassie and Paddle are thrust onto their own, for trapped by the raging waters, they are carried from their home and family -- forced to begin their own new beaver colony. The book links the young beavers to the pulsing throb of the surrounding pond and forest in a gentle story of beaver life in the wilderness.

Text and drawings document the pregnancy of a wild mouse and the birth of the babies.

Chronicles the life of a great horned owl from the time he is hatched until he mates and begins his own family.

Chronicles the life of a great horned owl from the time he is hatched until he mates and begins his own family.

A young boy's pet mouseling is faced with a life-and-death struggle for survival when she escapes from the house into the woods.

Describes 50 of the most popular breeds of horses and ponies, with history, points of conformation, and full-page illustrations.

Did you ever wish you could explore inside a swamp without: - getting soaking wet - becoming totally lost - being scared out of your wits - getting all mucky - or being eaten by an alligator? Well, now you CAN. The Southern Swamp Explorer is your ticket into the real life of a swamp. You can read it in bed, from your hammock, lying in the grass or at your desk -- living life right along with the swamp's wild creatures, and not even get a mosquito bite. OR, you can take this book with you when you go swamping. It will answer your questions and make you want to know more -- much more. (And you'll probably find the answers right there in the book.) The unusual format features an ongoing real-life fictional narrative of the interconnected daily life of more than forty swamp creatures -- birds, reptiles, mammals, fish, insects and plants. Facing each story page are illustrated side-bars crammed full of cool info and fun facts.

A young girl finds that the injured, disheveled pony she buys out of pity at an auction really is the black stallion of her dreams.

Bobcat and squirrel kittens, batlings, bear cubs, and other wild animal babies learn to survive in their canyon environment.

Describes the physical characteristics and habits of the northern elephant seal.