The Artist's Muse
Unlock The Door To Your Creativity

Author: Betsy Dillard Stroud
Pages: 95
Page size: 8 1/2" x 10"
Publisher: North Light Books
Cover: Hard with removable book & card tray
Item Code: 4L0150
Weight: 1.9 lbs.

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MSRP: $26.99

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Back Cover Information

Creative opportunity is always knocking, but can you hear it over the drone of everyday life? Unlock the door and open it wide to allow your muse to appear. Travel artistic pathways you've left uncharted, unrevealed, untried.

Inspired by her popular articles in Watercolor Magic, Betsy Dillard Stroud delivers creative challenges, inspirational chapters and profiles that reveal the personal and expressive thought process behind her own work and the work of many other successful artists. Inside, explore ways to loosen up, break through creative blocks and stray joyously from the beaten path.

What glorious discoveries hide behind your creative door? Turn the key for a bona fide aesthetic joy ride.

Cut The Card!

Inside you'll find three decks of cards that suggest subjects to paint, color schemes to explore, and creative approaches that force you to think "outside the box." To play, simply draw a card from one, two or all three decks, depending on how much you wish to challenge yourself. Then create a painting based on the directives written on the cards you choose. Every shuffle of the deck guarantees an aesthetic win. What are you waiting for? Pick a card!

Instruction Page

About the Author

Betsy Dillard Stroud grew up in Rocky Mount, Virginia in a family with a host of characters straight from the pages of Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill and Noel Coward. When she was eight, an insightful uncle gave her a set of oil paints, and she began to study with a private tutor. Her next artistic phase included drawing frizzy headed women smoking cigarettes (blond with no eyebrows) wearing extremely low-cut bathing suits.

A former art historian, Stroud received her B.A. in art from Radford University and her M.A. in art history from the University of Virginia, where she was the first woman in the graduate arts program. She had just completed her course work and her orals for the doctorate when she wrote her first book—changing her life forever.

Since 1987, Stroud has conducted workshops and judged exhibitions nationwide. Her work hangs in collections all over the United States, and also in Japan, England, Australia, Canada and the Bahamas.

Stroud is a signature member and Dophin Fellow of the American Watercolor Society and holds signature status in the National Watercolor Society and the Rocky Mountain National Watercolor Honor Society. A professional writer, Stroud has authored three books, most recently Painting From the Inside Out. She has written for magazines for the last nineteen years and for the last five has been contributing editor to Watercolor Magic. When not painting, writing, playing the piano, ballroom dancing, watching movies or going to Park Central Toastmaster, you can find her daydreaming. She lives in Scottsdale, Arizona with her new bad cat, Hamlet.

Explore & Develop Creativity thru exercises