Once I bought Don Seegmiller's book, DIGITAL CHARACTER DESIGN AND PAINTING I've spent hours, no, days, with pencil and computer delving into this book. And my education has increased considerably. I've read many how-to art books and few have left any visible mark on both my studio and computer creations. Don's
book is like a ... of art - everything is there. First, the beginning section is priceless in creating a character. Don's suggestions and questions give details to my amorphous mind-picture. A writer could learn from this section as well.

And then there is the section on basic art principles which is simply, yet expansively, written. Now I understand that mystery called value. Throughout this book also is the challenge to respect your art and creativity.

Now comes the tutorials using Corel's Painter. I've had Painter
for years and loved it - but it was a secretive and distant lover. The tutorials demonstrate so many possibilities and, if anyone calls themselves an artist, they must make art, - the making with these tutorials are fun.

Don's art is wonderful - a rare combination of beauty and humor. His art is topnotch!

Buy the book and work it thoroughly, it'll be well worth the time and mental energy!!!

Unquestionably one of the best - if not only - books on digital painting out there. Seegmiller uncovers his own techniques using Painter 7 for painting. No longer shall I scour the web for tutorials and hints, because it's all right here in his book. In addition to digital painting and character development, Seegmiller also includes information covering the fundementals of color, lighting and composition. In part it's an invaulable resource for artists as well as a manual for guiding one into the realm of digital painting. Don - if you're reading this - a HUGE thanks!! You're book is long overdue but very welcomed!!

I am very picky and highly selective when it comes to purchasing books, and this book surpasses all of my expectations. Not only does Digital Character Design and Painting offer step-by-step examples on how to digitaly paint characters, create textures, and paint trees, but it also provides a thorough insight on how to develop your own character designs. Seegmiller has written an excellent book that is useful to every artist - from beginning to advance. You will not regret buying this book!

I had bought this book, thinking it would teach my teen how to be less defensive. What it did was teach me how to deal with her defensiveness. I found that, by using the book's techniques, I was able to defuse potential battles and our house is much, much calmer as I can now defuse the power struggles she initiates. I also found that I have used the techniques many times with others in the family and with those in various groups to which I belong. I have been reading and re-reading the book ever since I got it a year ago, to ingrain the techniques. I cannot recommend this book more highly. It opened my eyes and changed my way of communicating.

I happened upon this book surfing the net for something else, and when I saw the title, I ordered it right away hoping it would be good. I haven't finished it yet, because my husband and I are reading it aloud to each other whenever we get the chance. But we are well into it, and it is excellent. I can't believe it isn't more popular.

The first part of the book is about how we (as a culture) learn to communicate and use language based on a war model. She gives examples of every war tactic and how that plays out in real-life day-to-day situations. I guarantee, they will all be familiar to you. She doesn't miss much in analyzing how people unintentionally communicate poorly with one another. I went to a party after reading that section and was hyper-aware of how I and others communicated. It was very interesting and helpful. But I couldn't wait to get to the next section on how to communicate well!

The rest of the book is about how to replace the old unhealthy way of communicating with a healthy way of communicating that gives you power and confidence in your day-to-day interactions, and minimizes conflict. Her theory that we need to "take the war out of our words" before we can achieve peace at home and in the world, to me, seems like an obvious but brilliant perception. She seems very dedicated to spreading this message and educating people. I think she does an excellent job. This is the kind of stuff I wish we were learning in our schools! Great read.

Ms. Ellison has written a profoundly important book. Practicing the principles she lays out so clearly will promote the small changes we all need to improve our lives that can lead to larger change in society as a whole. The book contains no fluff or padding- unlike so many books in the "self help" genre- just simply stated useful information from first page to last. I am a family therapist who has been dealing with communications issues for a long time and i have learned enormously from this book and have suggested it to all of my clients and friends. The author has created a well thought out system to teach how being vulnerable, open and clear can make us inhabit our own power as well. The skills she teaches are applicable to all relationships in our lives. This is truly an important work of substantive contribution to our society.

This book is great! I first got one for my daughter when she was about 2 (and a real Daddy's girl!). She loved it so much she'd go to sleep with it! The pull-tabs are pretty easy to move, even for her, but most of the time I have to do it for her and help her resist the temptation of tearing away at the parts that stand out. Well, having been somewhat unsuccessful in doing that, we now have to get a second copy for her little brother! But not until after we wore out the battary in the book first!

My 18 month old daughter received this as a Christmas gift from her Grandparents and absolutely loves reading it with Dad and Mom or on her own. She loves to pull the tabs and surprisingly enough after several months of abuse, it still works. I'm purchasing another copy so her brother has a chance to read this great book!

My baby boy Emre, loved this book since he was 12 months old. Now he is 16 months old and he is still crazy about it. When I take this book out, he gets involved in it for at least half an hour. Nothing else can do that. He imitates the sounds and loves to pull the tabs. Of course the figures got pretty damaged with such pulling and tearing but still it works. And the book is quite good in making the mother role an independent one, and making the father the care taker at home, at least for one night.
I deinitely recommend it.

Don't Bug Me
By: Pam Zollman
Reviewed by: J.Lau
Period: 6
This book is about a girl named Megan and how she needs to find twenty-five bugs for her science project. She also has a little bother that steals her bugs and buries them. One of her classmates, Charlie, has a secret crush on Megan but also make fun of her when she has a shortage of bugs. One day Megan finds out that Charlie is afraid of bugs and can get him back but decides to help him instead. Megan's little brother ends up helping Charlie start to like bugs. At the end both Megan and Charlie have bugs for their science project and they become very good friends.
I liked this book because it is both funny and touching. The funniest part of this book was when Charlie and his friend pull a prank on the girls. Charlie and his friends had put a rubber bug in one of the girl's soup and lots of candy bugs in Megan's lunch box. Then one of the teachers picked up a candy bug and sniffed it, then- to our horror- bit it. We did a group shudder as she smiled. Those really made me laugh because all the girls thought that the bugs were real.
The other part that I really liked in this book is when Charlie gives Megan a present on the bus. The morning Megan's science project was due; she gets on the bus and finds out that Charlie has a present for her. "This is for you," he yelled above all the chatter and noise. Then he passed forward a small box wrapped in tissue paper with a note attached. Then all the boys on the bus made kissing sounds. When Megan opened the present it was a dead wasp.
My favorite part was when Charlie told Megan that he liked her. When Charlie was talking to Megan one afternoon after they took Megan's little brother to the park, Charlie was telling Megan a lot of things that he didn't even tell his best friend. Megan asked Charlie why he was telling her all these things and Charlie said that he never really cared about who he made fun of but when he made fun of her it felt different. Then Charlie told Megan that he liked her and asked if she liked her back. Megan was so stunned that she didn't know what to say so they just decided to be friends until Megan was old enough to date. I think that's the sweetest thing.

We read Don't Bug Me at school and I like how Megan and Charlie became friends. I liked it when Charlie went to the park with Megan and Alexander. He told them why he didn't like bugs. I thought the best part was in the cafeteria. That was so funny! I really love this book. I wish it was a movie and then I could watch it all the time.

While I was reading this book, I have to admit that I could not put it down. Each page had me wanting to read the next until I was completely done with the book! After reading it, I recommended it to all my friends and told them that they just had to read it! I thought it was really funny when Megan actually went to the school's cafeteria to find the bugs. Its like every kids nightmare to find bugs in their food at the cafeteria. I also loved the bug grave yard. It was a great book and fully recommend it to everyone!

A nice, soft book, and really worth reading for some very powerful relationship insights and skills. Some of the book's themes and ideas i found nice on paper, but useless (for me) in practice.

"What can i do right now that will make a positive difference?". Sounds nice. Tried it. It just does not seem to do anything for me. (If you use this skill successfully and profitibly, please write me and let me know how. Maybe i just don't get it.)

Other ideas in this book- especially relating to relationship skills- are incredibly powerful, and very well, very clearly, very simply described. I find myself using, relating to, and sharing the ideas and metaphores, years after reading the book.

Ideas like "Facade-to-Facade" communication vs. heart to heart communication; "Is it safe for me to be me when I am with you?"; the story of the farmer and his horse. These wonderful gems expressed so gently but so clearly that they have stayed with me, and enriched my relationships for years.

For these gems, this relatively short book, is well worth the price, and the time to read it. I promise.

This book was recommended to me in 1995, by a friend who knew that I was struggling with a difficult marriage and a business that was going nowhere. "Read this!" he said, "it will change your life." So, having little to lose, I bought the book and read it.

"Wake-up Calls" perhaps didn't change my LIFE, but it certainly gave me some things to think about.

The fundamental idea in this book is that many of us fall into a pattern of "sleepwalking" through our lives, but life also presents us with a large number of so-called "wake-up calls." These can range from major-- divorce, bankruptcy, getting fired-- to relatively minor-- a promotion, an invitation to an important social event. Each wake-up call generally results in us facing a "choice point," and from each choice point, we have the chance to learn and grow.

The book is fairly simple and very easy to read, and guides the reader through a step-by-step process of first teaching us to recognize where we may have choice points; then goes on to teach us how to overcome old habits, change direction-- and go on to "stay awake" instead of sleepwalking through life.

Almost every chapter is laid out with bullet-point lists, simple exercises to use with your OWN situation; as well as a closing list of "Awareness Checks"-- a list of questions to make readers think about how to apply the current chapter to their own life. The writing is "light" and Allenbaugh uses personal anecdotes to help readers relate "ideas" to "reality."

Overall Rating: Highly Recommended (9 bookmarks out of a possible 10) BUT this book is probably best suited to those who are just BEGINNING a journey of self-discovery. It provides some straightforward principles for "getting on with life." Although I have certainly referred back to "Wake-up Calls" from time to time, it is a somewhat basic motivational book, and probably too simplistic for someone who has already spent some time with other self-exploration.

This book helped me move on!. There comes a time in life when you take a look around and say "do I stay or do I go". Wake-Up Calls help me see that the moving on wasn't as hard has I had expected it to be. A step by step guide to opening your eyes to what is going on around you is what this was for me. I was a stay at home mother, and very good at it, with great potential to be even more. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your Wake-Up Call.

As a long-time resident of LA (though not a native), one hears the occasional whisper about Chavez Ravine. It's widely known that Dodger Stadium was built atop these old neighborhoods, in millions of cubic yards of landfill.

Oh, but at what a price.

Normark, who says in his introduction that he grew up in a town in Washington state peopled by Swedish immigrants that felt similar to these three warm communities, was in exactly the right place, at the right time, to capture on film the places and the homes and the people who lived in them that we now know were doomed to either be destroyed (the buildings) or ripped from their roots (the people).

His black and white photographs, made on a knockoff of a Rollei in medium format, have the tonal range very typical of this period -- all those fine shades of black and white that film noir fans should love.

But the people he's illustrating aren't sinister like those movies at all. They're deeply human, alive, a family both "nuclear" and extended. You see a young girl, her Sunday dress on, a soft smile on her lips, with a book titled "Enchanting Stories" on her lap. You see games of stickball in the street. Confirmations at the church. Families at their meals. Goats grazing on the grassy hills.

All this in a small community maybe two or three miles, at most, to the northeast of LA City Hall.

These pictures are married to the recent reminiscences, like the other reviews here, of both former Ravine residents and their families.

Seeing this book, one understands why, 50 years later, Los Desterrados -- the Uprooted -- have a picnic every year in Elysian Park, just behind their former homes.

The most haunting image, in some ways, for me: Palo Verde School. It wasn't razed for Dodger Stadium. The roof was taken off, and then the landfill came along. So the school is still there, buried under the Stadium somewhere.

So if any of my fellow Dodger fans ever hear kids playing in a schoolyard as we walk back to our parked cars... It might be well to listen to those voices just a bit more closely. And look to this book to see the children's faces.

Nestled in the hills between downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena is Chávez Ravine, site of Dodger Stadium and its acres of parking lots. Few baseball fans here could tell you that long before the Dodgers left Brooklyn, Chávez Ravine was the home of three communities of Mexican-American laborers and their families.

Don Normark, a young photographer in 1948, was climbing in the hills looking for postcard-shot views of LA when he discovered La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop. Each neighborhood was a rambling cluster of buildings, dirt streets, and footpaths. The wooded slopes of Elysian Park overlooked the ravine, and beyond were the peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains. He felt he had found another world -- a kind of Shangri-La. For many months, he returned to take pictures of what he saw and of the people he met there. He didn't know that he was recording on film the daily life of a place and its people that was about to disappear.

The pictures, of course, are black and white, a rich range of gray tones and contrasts under the cloudless southern California sky. In a casual street scene, two men stand talking on the hard dirt, and a third, his back to them, leans across a low concrete wall. All is in sharp focus from the dusty tire track in the foreground to the pointed tower of City Hall nudging up over a darkly wooded ridge in the distance. The mid-afternoon light reflects brightly off one man's tee shirt and from the front of a small white house farther on. Meanwhile, the shadows cast by eaves, palm fronds, parked cars, and the men themselves are deeply dark.

There are many pictures of people, of all ages. Some look into the camera. Most are busy working, walking, talking, playing. A young girl wears her confirmation dress. A boy watches his father repair a car. Two men spar under branches thick with bougainvillea blossoms. An iceman stands in an open gateway, tongs slung over one shoulder. A young woman arranges flowers on an altar. A workman returns home along a winding footpath at the end of the day (see book jacket above).

Fifty years later, Normark gathered together his pictures and began looking for the people who had once lived in Chávez Ravine. This book is an album of those pictures, with commentary by the people he found, in their own words. Normark writes simply and clearly about himself and his experiences. Like his photographs, his writing style is sharply focused. In the opening pages of the book, he describes the forced relocation of the people of Chávez Ravine during the Fifties, and the various public and private interests contending for control of its development. Normark's book is both handsome and beautifully written, a fine example of text and image illuminating each other.

This book is full of classic, socially-conscious photography that bears a spiritual kinship with Dorothea Lange's Depression Era photos of Dustbowl Families. The images are doubly rich: as Old School black and white images shot on a reasonable speed film, with a broad and caress-ably subtle range of grays, and also as a record of a time and place that was stolen, and will simply never be again.

For those who don't know the story, in a nutshell: The residents of Chavez Ravine, who were almost entirely Latino, were offered the promise that their community would be replaced by public housing as part of a renewal project of sorts. (Some had called their neighborhood blighted.) But as the land acquisition proceeded, and as various official pledges were reneged and political cards played (including exploitation of the then current fear of creeping Socialism/Communism-- after all, I ask you, what could be more unAmerican than affordable replacement housing?), the project proved to be a lie. The final hold-outs at Chavez Ravine were bodily removed by deputies as the last remnants of the neighborhood were cleared to make way for a sports field and parking lot. (!)

This volume is great because these photos, which speak so eloquently of one specific place and time, also speak clearly of universal things. Children play; young couples tie the knot as family celebrates; honest and good people work to protect what is theirs, to better their lot, and just to get by. -- It is about nothing less than the struggle and joy of life itself.

If there is any uplift to the wistful story this book tells in beautiful images and words, it is in that the displaced people survived, persevered, and that their old home, and what happened there, is remembered today.

Sometimes, you have to search for the bright spot. A thought-provoking read. Recommended.

I read "Bird-Self Accumulated" nearly 7 years ago and proclaimed it brilliant. When will we see another work like this from Judson? To the author: please don't let this be a one-hit-wonder. Please, please....more!!

Judson's minimalist poetic prose leads the reader to a sucking black sinkhole in which we find our common selves exposed. His characters repulse, yet we recognize ourselves in them. A brilliant read. What's next from this author?

Only Dostoyevski on his bad days approaches the profound despair that illuminates this book. It asks fundamental human questions, and the answers are always those of nihilism. Yet the characters of the book flame with life, are real and hungry and lusting. They are "workers in the realm of death"just as are the soldiers in Ernst Junger's STORM OF STEEL, the great novel of WW I. But these are just hoods, punks, scum. Though they live, breathe, and want as do the rest of us. The moments pass by like heavy, leaden sentries that guard a secret no one wants to know. But Judson draws us ever nearer the secret in a brilliant, lyric prose that would seem to be totally alien to such a world, yet expresses it perfectly. Hell is a poem. And the wretched, deranged, violent, and angry, are the poets. There are very few books like this in American literature, and it really does take genius to create such a book. We are such stuff as nightmares are made of, and we know it.

DIAMONDS is a well crafted affirmation that values of quality can be put into action in anyone's life with enriching results. The comfortable pace and use of real life illustrations encourage the reader to pause and consider how the qualities described could impact their own experience. I intend to reread DIAMONDS and have recommended it to others.

Building on eight character traits and real examples, the authors show how living according to these principles has positively affected the lives successful people. They provide a beacon of hope for those who want to conduct business with integrity and show how good ethics are good business.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is very well written and held my attention throughout. The stories about real people made this book come alive for me. I found it difficult to put down. I highly recommend it.

I first saw this book while browsing for something completely different. The price was right so i decided to pick it up. I really wasnt expecting much at all from it, but was pleasantly surprised to find it explained alot where behavior comes from when dealing with others in plain English. I wouldnt say it gives enough advice to do as the title says, but it does give alot of insight into re-evaluating past rejection--especailly with families. I feel this book has a lot of pontential, but unfortuantely doesnt explore things into as much depth as i would prefer. I would also have liked to see more said about approaching things and how to change instead of just exploring where certain things come from. However, it has a lot of great ideas presented clearly. All in all, a good book.

The book Dr Savage wrote was absolutely electrifying to me! I did not expect to have answers and solutions to my personal and social questions. As an example, I was stunned to realize that I cry, when my husband directs his anger at me because I was emotionally abused as a child. That was something that never occurred to me. And I better understand things like why women stay with me who are severely abusive to them. As a result of reading his book, I'm noticing when I start to sabotage my hearts desire and I can reverse that action. I think if I read this book over and over I will continue to glean true jewels of understanding about myself and those around me. I definitely take this book personally. I think everyone could use this as a guide book to improve their life and understand the people of the world a little better.

"Don't Take it Personally" is a wonderful guide to exploring the rejection encountered in family, intimate, office, and social relationships. Elayne Savage's personalized and clear style engaged me from the beginning and led me through the process of identifying, understanding and taking control of my rejection issues. Dr. Savage establishes a comfortable atmosphere to understand the impact of childhood experiences of rejection on adult relationships and expectations, and helped me to realize that I am not alone in my feelings. In fact, throughout the book I often found myself exclaiming "Wow, that's me!"