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Launching the Imagination: A Guide to Three-Dimensional Design
Mary Stewart
The three-dimensional volume of one of the most widely assigned foundations texts in American art schools. Mary Stewart treats design as both verb and noun — a deliberate process of generating many options and choosing well, as much as a finished object — and walks the beginning student from the elements and principles of 3-D form through materials, methods, and critique. It is a studio-foundations textbook, plainly, but a thoughtful one: it takes creative and critical thinking as teachable skills rather than mystery, and it is among the few foundations books to give real space to time-based and four-dimensional work. A clear, methodical starting point for anyone learning to think in three dimensions.
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The author
Mary Stewart (b. 1952) is a working artist — her pieces have shown in more than eighty exhibitions, and she has held grants for choreography as well — and the Foundations Program Director in the art department at Florida State University. She co-founded the Integrative Teaching Thinktank and has been honored with the FATE (Foundations in Art: Theory and Education) Master Educator award. The book comes from a career spent specifically on the problem of how you teach the first year of art, which is its real subject.
The book
Part of the larger Launching the Imagination series, which spans 2-D, 3-D, and 4-D (time-based) design; this is the dedicated three-dimensional guide, here in its fourth edition, published by McGraw-Hill. Like most foundations texts it is revised frequently, so the edition matters more for the examples and reproductions than for the underlying pedagogy.
How it has aged
As a durable, much-updated standard rather than a period piece — its through-line, design as an iterative process of thinking and not just making, has if anything become more central to how foundations are now taught.
For more context
The classic ancestors of the studio-foundations genre: Wassily Kandinsky's Point and Line to Plane and the Bauhaus teaching of Johannes Itten and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Mary Stewart
- Publisher
- McGraw-Hill
- Edition
- 4th edition
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Paperback
- Shelf
- Craft & How-to
- Location
- Maine