20% OFF* selected marked titles in April.

This month we’ve selected a number of titles from across the store that will help unlock your creative side! From books on art to the art of asking, and books that will help you to be creative with your hands, your words, your thoughts and your everyday life.

Take a look at some of the selection here, or come visit us in store to browse the full list!

365 Days of Art : A Creative Exercise for Every Day of the Year
by Lorna Scobie

365 Days of Art is an inspiring journal designed to help readers and budding artists nurture their creativity and explore their feelings through the medium of art.

Featuring an activity for every day of the year, from simple tasks like drawing shapes and lines, to more mindful exercises like coloring-in, painting with primary colors, and drawing what you see. With beautiful, vibrant hand-lettering and watercolor illustrations, the book pairs inspiring quotes with supportive prompts and exercises to spark reflection through your drawing, writing, painting and more.

The Art of Asking: How I learned to stop worrying and let people help
by Amanda Palmer

Imagine standing on a box in the middle of a busy city, dressed as a white-faced bride, and silently using your eyes to ask people for money. Or touring Europe in a punk cabaret band, and finding a place to sleep each night by reaching out to strangers on Twitter. For Amanda Palmer, actions like these have gone beyond satisfying her basic needs for food and shelter – they’ve taught her how to turn strangers into friends, build communities, and discover her own giving impulses. And because she had learned how to ask, she was able to go to the world to ask for the money to make a new album and tour with it, and to raise over a million dollars in a month. In the New York Times bestseller The Art of Asking, Palmer expands upon her popular TED talk to reveal how ordinary people, those of us without thousands of Twitter followers and adoring fans, can use these same principles in our own lives.

The Art of Creative Thinking
by Rod Judkins

A scuba diving company faces bankruptcy because sharks have infested the area. Solution? Open the world’s first extreme diving school.

The Art of Creative Thinking reveals how we can transform ourselves, our businesses and our society through a deeper understanding of human creativity. Drawing on an extraordinary range of reference points – from the Dada Manifesto to Nobel Prize Winning economists, from Andy Warhol’s studio to Einstein’s desk – he distils a lifetime’s expertise into a succinct, surprising book that will inspire you to think more confidently and creatively. Be stubborn about compromise. Plan to have more accidents. Be mature enough to be childish. Contradict yourself more often.

Big Magic : Creative Living Beyond Fear
by Elizabeth Gilbert

Elizabeth Gilbert digs deep into her own generative process to share her wisdom and unique perspective about creativity. With profound empathy and radiant generosity, she offers potent insights into the mysterious nature of inspiration. She asks us to embrace our curiosity and let go of needless suffering. She shows us how to tackle what we most love, and how to face down what we most fear. She discusses the attitudes, approaches, and habits we need in order to live our most creative lives. Balancing between soulful spirituality and cheerful pragmatism, Gilbert encourages us to uncover the “strange jewels” that are hidden within each of us.

Whether we are looking to write a book, make art, find new ways to address challenges in our work, embark on a dream long deferred, or simply infuse our everyday lives with more mindfulness and passion, Big Magic cracks open a world of wonder and joy.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
by Anne Lamott

‘Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”’ – Anne Lamott

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott, a bestselling novelist and memoirist, distills what she’s learned over years of trial and error. Beautifully written, wise, and immensely helpful, this is the book for serious writers and writers-to-be.

Children’s Writer’s Notebook: 20 Great Authors and 70 Writing Exercises
by Wes Magee

The Children’s Writer’s Notebook is a perfect journal for writers of fiction for young people. It features profiles of 20 important writers from the past 150 yearsm plus numerous activities and exercises to help you hone your craft and encourage your creativity.

Activities include: – using memorable rhymes (Dr Seuss) – creating curious characters (Maurice Sendak) – producing witty dialogue that moves a story forward (AA Milne) – imagining and describing fantastival landscapes (Antoine de Saint Exupery) – developing suspenseful action sequences (JK Rowling).

Conversations with Creative Women: Volume Three
by Tess McCabe

Independently published and printed in Australia on beautiful uncoated, environmentally friendly paper, each woman interviewed in Conversations with Creative Women: Volume Three talks about her career path, offers tips, shares advice, and gives us insights into the passion that fuels creative women.

Featuring exclusive interviews with designer Emily Green, letterer Barbara Enright, interior architect Pascale Gomes McNabb, comedian Alex Ward, photographer Luisa Brimble, and more. Focusing on change and evolution, Conversations with Creative Women: Volume Three also revisits a selection of women interviewed in previous volumes to see where they’re at now with their careers and businesses. The twists and turns, challenges and achievements will surprise and delight you.

Creative Confidence : Unleashing the Creative Potential within Us All
by Tom Kelley and David Kelley

Too often, companies and individuals assume that creativity and innovation are the domain of the `creative types’. But two of the foremost experts in innovation, design and creativity on the planet show us that each and every one of us is creative.

In an entertaining and inspiring narrative that draws on countless stories from their work at IDEO, and with many of the world’s top companies and design firms, David and Tom Kelley identify the principles and strategies that will allow us to tap into our creative potential in our work lives, and in our personal lives, allow us to think outside the box in terms of how we approach and solve problems. Creative Confidence is a book that will help each of us be more productive and successful in our lives and in our careers.

The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
by Twyla Tharp

What makes someone creative? How does someone face the empty page, the empty stage and making something where nothing existed before? Not just a dilemma for the artist, it is something everyone faces everyday. What will I cook that isn’t boring? How can I make that memo persuasive? What sales pitch will increase the order, get me the job, lock in that bonus? These too, are creative acts, and they all share a common need: proper preparation. For Twyla Tharp, creativity is no mystery; it’s the product of hard work and preparation, of knowing one’s aims and one’s subject, of learning from approaches taken in the past. It’s a process undertaken every day. It’s a habit. The Creative Habit is not merely a look inside the mind of a remarkable woman with remarkable skills, but a programmatic, inspiring, encouraging guide to help each of us achieve our fullest creative potential.

The Creative Tarot : A Modern Guide to an Inspired Life
by Jessa Crispin

What if the path to creativity was not as challenging as everyone thinks? What if you could find that spark, plot twist, or next project by simply looking at your life and your art through a different lens?

Written for novices and seasoned readers alike, The Creative Tarot is a unique guidebook that reimagines tarot cards and the ways they can boost the creative process. Jessa Crispin guides you through the intuitive world of the tarot to get those creative juices flowing again. Thought to be esoteric and mystical, tarot cards are approachable and endlessly helpful to overcoming creative blocks. Crispin offers spiritual readings of the cards, practical information for the uninspired artist, and a wealth of fascinating anecdotes about famous artists including Virginia Woolf, Rembrandt, and David Bowie, and how they found inspiration.

Daily Rituals
by Mason Currey

Benjamin Franklin took daily naked air baths and Toulouse-Lautrec painted in brothels. Edith Sitwell worked in bed, and George Gershwin composed at the piano in pyjamas. From Marx to Murakami and Beethoven to Bacon, Daily Rituals by Mason Currey presents the working routines of more than a hundred and sixty of the greatest philosophers, writers, composers and artists ever to have lived. Whether by amphetamines or alcohol, headstand or boxing, these people made time and got to work.

Featuring photographs of writers and artists at work, and filled with fascinating insights on the mechanics of genius and entertaining stories of the personalities behind it, Daily Rituals is irresistibly addictive, and utterly inspiring.

Don’t Read This Book: Time Management for Creative People
by Donald Roos

As creative people, we have ideas. Some of us have many ideas, others have really good ones, and most of us have many really good ideas. But most of these never see the light of day. Why? If you ask a creative person, the answer will always revolve around time. Don’t Read This Book focuses on how to make choices about everything you do in your daily creative practice and life. The book follows the ‘To Don’t List’ method: When you say ‘no’ to one idea, you have more time to execute another one. In short: the more you subtract, the more focus and time you get. The book covers everything from defining your life goals, to writing a five sentence-long email, to leaving out as much as possible in a project. Whether you are a student or professional, this book will save you time. (Of course, if you don’t read it, you will save some time directly.)

Ideas Are Your Only Currency
by Rod Judkins

What skills and abilities will a student need to prosper in five, ten, or fifteen years’ time?

In a world of change, where skills become out of date quickly, it is ideas that last. We all need to be prepared for a world that is fluid, global and interdisciplinary. Distinctions between specialties will blur and overlap. Change is happening at electrifying speed. In this vortex there are no maps.

Acclaimed artist and business consultant Rod Judkins reveals how to inspire great ideas, and how to future-proof yourself in the knowledge economy.

The Last Black Unicorn
by Tiffany Haddish

From stand-up comedian, actress, and breakout star of Girls Trip, Tiffany Haddish, comes The Last Black Unicorn, a sidesplitting, hysterical, edgy, and unflinching collection of (extremely) personal essays, as fearless as the author herself. Growing up in one of the poorest neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles, Tiffany learned to survive by making people laugh. If she could do that, then her classmates would let her copy their homework, the other foster kids she lived with wouldn’t beat her up, and she might even get a boyfriend.

None of that worked (and she’s still single), but it allowed Tiffany to imagine a place for herself where she could do something she loved for a living: comedy. Finally poised to become a household name, she recounts with heart and humor how she came from nothing and nowhere to achieve her dreams by owning, sharing, and using her pain to heal others.

Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World
by Tim Harford

The urge to tidiness seems to be rooted deep in the human psyche. Many of us feel threatened by anything that is vague, unplanned, scattered around or hard to describe. We find comfort in having a script to rely on, a system to follow, in being able to categorise and file away. We all benefit from tidy organisation – up to a point. Order is imposed when chaos would be more productive. Or if not chaos, then . . . messiness. The trouble with tidiness is that, in excess, it becomes rigid, fragile and sterile.

In Messy, Tim Harford reveals how qualities we value more than ever – responsiveness, resilience and creativity – simply cannot be disentangled from the messy soil that produces them. This, then, is a book about the benefits of being messy: messy in our private lives; messy in the office, and messy in our approach to business, politics and economics, leaving things vague, diverse and uncomfortably made-up-on-the-spot. It’s time to rediscover the benefits of a little mess.

The Revolution Handbook
by Alice Skinner

Seen the news? Hate it? Don’t know what to do next? Start a revolution with artist and activist Alice Skinner’s guided journal. Perfect for anyone who dreams of a better world and wants to help make it a reality. With dozens of prompts that are both snarky and practical, The Revolution Handbook will get you to stop yelling helplessly at your news feed and start planning your resistance.

Fill the interior pages to track the movements you admire and want to join. Set out your arguments on paper BEFORE you get tongue-tied at the dinner table. Plan your protests, make time for self-care, catalogue the heroes you want to remember and even sew Trump’s mouth shut. So what are you waiting for? It’s time to grab a pen and start your revolution. Get all your thoughts and emotions out – and get ready to change the world!

Story Box : Create Your Own Fairy Tales
by Anne Laval

Can you save the missing elf before he is eaten by the big, bad wolf? Is the witch offering you a poisoned apple, or will she help you – by magically shrinking the giant pink rabbit that is terrorizing your castle? This wonderful game will allow your family to create its own fairy tales. Highly original and with a contemporary twist, this game contains 20 puzzle pieces printed on both sides, which can be interchanged to allow for all kinds of plots.

Wonderbook : The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction
by Jeff Vandermeer

This all-new definitive guide to writing imaginative fiction takes a completely novel approach and fully exploits the visual nature of fantasy through original drawings, maps, renderings, and exercises to create a spectacularly beautiful and inspiring object. Employing an accessible, example-rich approach, Wonderbook energizes and motivates while also providing practical, nuts-and-bolts information needed to improve as a writer.

Aimed at aspiring and intermediate-level writers, Wonderbook includes helpful sidebars and essays from some of the biggest names in fantasy today, such as George R. R. Martin, Lev Grossman, Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, Catherynne M. Valente, and Karen Joy Fowler, to name a few.

*Not in conjunction with any other offer. Discount applies to selected marked titles only in store and online until 30 April 2018.