Discover how to harness your creative potential and turn your art into magic. In The Magic of Art, Taylor Ellwood shares how art can become a potent magical tool in your spiritual practice. You will learn how to combine sacred art with practical magic to get consistent results that transform your life. Best of all you don’t need to be a talented artist to use art magic. All you need to do is pick … pick up the paint brush, pencil, clay, etc., and start creating art that allows you to embody your magic and generate real results that change your life.In this book you’ll learn the following: What mediums of art you can use to create art magic. How to use art to create magical entities. How to create offerings with your art for the spirits you work with. How to create enchantments with art. How to create art magic tools that allow you to work your magic effortlessly. How to get results with your art magic that transforms your life. The Magic of Art will introduce a whole new set of techniques and tools to your magical practice that will enable you to get amazing results that change your life.
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Another brilliant work by the renowned Pop Culture Magick Author & Practitioner Taylor Ellwood . His newest book “The Magic of Art” propels the magicians’ workings via invocating inner artistic passions into a new personal outer-evoked reality. The first thing that I noticed when reading his book was how well-constructed it is. Taylor Elwood does an absolutely stellar job of communicating, presenting, and contextualizing the many aspects of the artistic process as it relates to Magick using his own personal experiences. And in such ways as: How can one’s personal art effect one’s own Inner Alchemy. How can we use our art to communicate with spirits? Why can’t we come up with our own divinatory art magic?
What makes Art Magic different from other magical workings is as Taylor Ellwood states: how better to influence the world than to use the attention of other people in the world through your own art to realize your results. I truly enjoyed reading this book as a magician and witch and artist myself and highly recommend it for all; whether one is a magician, an artist or just seeking new ways of thinking about interacting with one’s own and others creativity-based world. The author supplied me with a complimentary copy of his Book for my own magickal take on his aspect of PopCulture Magick and for a readers review.
This book is a wonderful introduction to art magic. There are many people who don’t have enough confidence to make art.
This book is encouraging to all, not just professional artists. So many people think they can’t draw so they won’t. It is sad to me that these potential creaters don’t make art. The author feels the same way and even confesses he’ll probably never have a gallery show. .He finds the process itself magical powerful and beneficial.
A lot of books that discuss art focus so much on how to do it and not enough on the process and how to use it in magic. He gets into immense detail including what to do with the picture when it isn’t hanging up, or how to place it for maximum effect.
The author also has guest contributors who write about their experiences of art and magic. Everyone tells their stories and they are very useful.
I’ve used art and magic for years but this book presented me with good basic questions and thoughts about it.
There are plenty of illustrations but I wish there could have been even more.
Taylor Ellwood was kind enough to provide me with a copy. He made it known that he wanted an honest review. My main criticism is the book could have been larger. It felt like the book could have gone even deeper.
An expansion of the uses of art of varying types in magic and as magic. I particularly liked Colleen Chitty’s contribution on healing for the damaged artist.
(I was given a copy of this book for review)
I like Talyor Ellwood’s emphasis on the practical side of magic and self-transformation. This book opened a few doors for me and gave me some new tools.
It’s easy to get caught in our own heads and ideas about how things should work, but these methods allow us to express, capture and work with feelings and ideas that may be obscured by the linear mind and objectify our internal processes.
My favorite chapter was on Internal Work and Inner Alchemy. The exercises and principles are extremely powerful and useful in personal work and I will incorporate them into my integration protocols for soul retrieval.
Reading and working through this book had an interesting side-effect, I was able to get past feeling “stuck” and my perfectionistic tendencies and go further and deeper using simple artistic expression.
Art naturally blends the Yin and Yang and I thoroughly enjoyed moving more deeply and easily into a Yin space to get into “the flow”, which IS the point of this book.
Thank you Taylor for a fun, interesting ride and for adding invaluably to my magical toolkit.
I have read several Taylor Ellwood books at this point, and this one is my favorite. It is a quick read packed with information, containing many of the author’s own magical artistic works. Taylor is open about the effect the work was intended to achieve, as well as whether or not it succeeded. I find this transparency quite refreshing. I received a free copy of this book for review, and I enjoyed it immensely.
In “The Magic of Art,” Taylor walks you through a process very few others address, and even when they do, it is generally not as clear as what he puts forth. If you are looking to take your art or your magick to the next level of creation, this is the book for you! When he gave me a copy to review, I was leery because I’m not really an artist, but by the end of the book, I can say that my approach to art has improved, and that it also opened up further understanding of my magick. His clear, down-to-earth style makes it easy to follow, and his emphasis on application is a refreshing change of pace from so many books based on art or magical theory. If you have an interest in either subject, I strongly encourage you to check this out, and allow yourself to be taken to new levels!
(I was provided a copy of this book to review)
This is definitely a Taylor Elwood book! I have read a few of his books at this point. He is consistent, and very distinct in the way he writes. Some people get a lot out of it, and some seem to find it off putting. I happen to be in the first camp, and here are more of my thoughts-
Taylor writes in a very academic style. He does not write 101 books, and both his word choice and the way he presents the ideas.
For example, he presents exercises at the end of each section. One section asks the reader to ‘make an entity using art’, to paraphrase. As a practitioner who has been doing this for a while, I had an idea what to do, if this was one of the first magic books I had ever read I would have been completely lost. However I don’t think this book is really marketed as a 101 book, so it didn’t bother me.
Another piece I really liked was that Taylor put his own art work into the book, do you have a visual idea of what he is trying to get across. No offense to him, but his work isn’t something generally associated with gallery level art. The fact that /he/ was the one to write this book is so perfect because of the stigma that people have about art, that it must technically good in order to be valuable. This book does a good job of challenging that idea.
I have not yet had the time to really practice with the depth of the magical technique in my practice, but I am excited to work it in over the next several months.
I am new to Taylor Ellwood’s writing; this is the first book of his I’ve read so I really didn’t know what to expect. Here’s a hint: if you want a book of artistic techniques that will turn you into an award-winning artist, this isn’t the book for you. Instead, the author seems to expect his audience to be more familiar with magical ideas than with the creation of art. If you’ve never drawn anything before in your life, and you love magic, you’ll probably love this book.
The introduction, although possibly fascinating for the more magical-minded, left me a bit bored. I was hoping the book would get better and, fortunately, it did. Taylor offers up photos of some of his own artwork, which is abstract in nature and uses color more often than complicated forms. You might want to copy some of his artwork literally, for personal use, but probably not. The reason is that each piece of artwork has a personal agenda; a “magical” intention that inspired the creation of the work, and for which the artwork hopefully assists in resolving.
Your intention may be different from mine, and both our intentions might be different from Taylor’s. Or maybe not. Only you know your intentions. The book has a few chapters in it. Each chapter deals with a slightly different facet of magical workings, shows an example of how Taylor used his artwork in a similar working, and finishes up with an optional exercise. Included are basic supply lists for people who want to get going on the magical part and don’t want to come up with a bucket list. I have not done any of the exercises, and that doesn’t mean I won’t in the future. The book has a feeling of being one that I might come back to and, perhaps, cherry pick through the exercises.
Taylor’s basic message is not to worry about whether you have any talent. Just get going with what you know and see what happens, and then share it with other people (hopefully nice people who will say something sweet) so that it can pick up “energy” from being looked at.
As someone who was trained at college level in the arts, and has no clue whether I have any artistic talent after so much education, I found some of the material a bit mind-numbing. This doesn’t mean that the material doesn’t have merits; it actually does. But, without the pressure of a client’s demands and a deadline, I realized just how far things had drifted from my pre-college days of playing with art and actually enjoying the experience. Taylor may just have a few decent ideas in his exercise suggestions. Or maybe not. The only way to know is to actually give it a try.
That’s just the first 100 pages or so. Interestingly, the last third of the book is where the collage starts to really get interesting. In an appendix format, several artists (all of whom happen to be female) dive in and share their artistic experiences, which range from avant-gard painting and dancing rituals, to textiles, to creatively writing about creative healing art in ways that make you remember the writing more than the art instruction.
And, last but not least, Taylor comes back into the picture and we get a little dissertation about magic of bodily health written by the author credited on the cover of the book, who dutifully includes an exercise at the end of this part, and the book trails along with a few more ads for more of his books.
I might have given this book five stars if the introduction had been more compelling, or if anyone in the book had mentioned anything about Veganism and art supplies. (hint: if you’re Vegan, or aspiring to be Vegan, look up Vegan art supplies before going out and making any purchases. You’ll be amazed at which suppliers are transparent about the materials in their paints, pencils, papers and brushes … and which are dubiously silent on the topic)
This is an honest review based on my feelings and opinion about the book after I read it. I was given a review copy in advance of publication, and I did not receive any monetary compensation for creating this review.