Fun inspirational book that might give you some inspiration and ideas whatever creative field you’re in. I enjoyed it.

Expressing emotions through objects

Assessing and ethically influencing people’s emotions is part of my job (and indeed, part of our daily life). When I want to learn more about emotions, I tend to look up articles in scientific journals, or read books from popular psychology.

Having come across the book You are an artist by Sarah Urist Green, made me realise how easy it it get myopic and look for new things in only the most obvious places. Availability heuristic? Complacency? I don’t know. 

The book itself presents art-related assignments, based on the work of various artists, to inspire creativity. All of the ideas are ingenious, one of my favourites being the fur-covered coffee cup and saucer. An apt example of Surrealism, It also helps surface aspects of our personality hiding in our subconscious. 

My absolute favourite must be Christoph Niemann’s opinion of emotions and his artwork reflecting this. As an artist, he’s always been aware that the face is is the ultimate goldmine of emotional expressions. He observed that sometimes, however, we pay too much attention to the face to gauge a person’s emotions, and fail to notice anything else. He started focusing on the ‘anything else’, and created artwork that expressed profound emotions by mixing objects and drawings. The book displays a yellow horse, whose hindquarters are made up of bananas, while his torso is drawn/painted.  
What was my conclusion after reading the book? Art is not just a source of creative inspiration, but has a clear point-of-view on expressing and detecting emotions. Still, the key take-away for me is to never stop using the mental fisheye lens when searching for something new.

This is a great book for giving a spark of inspiration when you're suffering artist's block, and it also gives you a push to try something out of your comfort zone or usual style/medium.
The book has a huge amount of great ideas and features a diverse range of visual artists, There are full-colour photographs and prompts/instructions to allow the reader to get the most out of this book creatively.
I like art books that give you a nudge for ideas and a push to create your own work rather than too much hand-holding and really specific step by steps, so this is ideal as an open-ended tool for opening doors to your imagination.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for letting me access an advance digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

5 out of 5 stars

Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley for sending me a copy of this!

This is a book for everyone. Anyone that wants to awaken their creative side. For me I always appreciated art and ways of expression through art but thought there was no point in attempting it if I'm not 'good'. The opinion of what's good is purely an own perspective. It's so important to remember that art is about escape and expression feelings and passion.

You Are an Artist is such an interesting different read and doesn't feel impossible for me who doesn't really do anything deemed artistic.

I highly recommend this to anyone wanting to get back into it or anyone or believes that they aren't artisitic.

Great read.

Fabulous book with numerous exercises to dip into, follow the book, or pick a random page. Many artists from around the world have contributed ideas to trigger art explorations using simple tools that can be undertaken indoors and out.

In You Are an Artist, over fifty artists from around the world share their creative techniques, and give you brilliantly imaginative exercises to inspire you to make your own art.
I feel like, as I am currently in lockdown, this book is a perfect purchase for right now as it allows you to use what you have and create something new. I took some time to review this book as I wanted to use it for it’s purpose, and honestly this book and it’s different activities and ideas will keep you busy.

I find the range of easy to difficult they are really good, nothing is too complicated and can be done if you are in lockdown currently on your exercise time for example if it needs to be done outside. I am working on a rug right now based on one of the projects in this book and my sister who I did a lot of these ideas with has been enjoying the photography projects, especially ideas like ‘The Muster’ that appear in the book.

This book has filled my time and kept my mind busy from the world outside and I highly recommend it to anyone who needs right now a little creativity in their lives as this book is packed with new ideas that can be adapted for any age really in my opinion as this book is written in really eloquent way and helps you understand new artistic ideas.

I really liked this book, it came with a lot of different ideas inspired by many different artists, some you may not have heard about before. It is also quite original, a lot of the ideas were a bit out there, but I think they would really appeal either to children, or to people who feel a bit stuck creatively. I feel many ideas aren't to be taken literally but more as a starting point to start creating something. Really liked how it was written and presented.

FTC disclosure: I would like to thank Penguin Press UK for providing me with an advance reader copy via access to the galley for free through the NetGalley program.

This was such a fantastic book! I’d recommend it to anyone, any age.

Especially during these times of staying at home, for homeschool parents, teachers, as well any individual experiencing creative blocks within any type of media, anyone looking to exercise their artistic mind and skills, really anyone who wants to tap into an expression of themselves through art, whether you're feeling super creative or going through a creative block, even a dry spell.

As far as content was concerned, it was out of the box, almost quirky, sometimes the bizarre, the peculiar, the types of art and art exercises I wouldn’t necessarily be inclined to make or decorate my house with or be typically drawn to. With that said; however, the art exercises focused on the actual doing of challenges, rather than an in-depth review of art interpretation which I think was unique to the world of art books and one that I definitely could use more time learning to appreciate and enjoy, and I had a blast doing them!

I found the projects in this book bringing out my imagination, much more hidden and less explored areas of my art perspective and a great creative outlet for my life in general.

I should also mention, and it was a real plus to the projects contained in this book, that you wouldn't have to go out and buy tons of art supplies to complete the projects. You can pretty much use any items you'd typically find in any junk drawer in the kitchen. Paper, scissors, pen/pencil, and also easily use your phone for any of the photo activities.

The activities brought out ideas, rich sentiment, variations of emotion, which would otherwise be unexpressed. Some of the more unconventional projects contained in this book, combined with the background of select artists, made each exercise thoroughly enjoyable, insightful, and stimulated my mind.

I enjoyed the facts about each artist who was mentioned. Somewhat of an encyclopedia-type approach, such as demographical data, like when and where they were born, but it did not discuss their influences, accomplishments, or personal/artistic challenges in-depth. Which was fine. Perhaps we will see some of this in a subsequent book, which would be awesome, along with some of the psychology behind the routes toward finding self-creativity/reflection for those who may want to explore personal style and what types of media may express or suit an artist’s voice in they way they’d like to achieve. Or which ones would be the best exercises for them to do on more than one occasions and how to vary them to bring out even more of the elements behind the reasoning of including them in the book.

I hope you get to check out this wonderfully fun book! You can see some of the exercises I did on my website and I will be adding more over time. Be sure to share which ones you did in the comments, I’d love to see your project creations!