How To Steal Like An Artist

Here's a relatively tiny e-book I read on my phone over the course of a week while babysitting. In a way, Austin Kleon has summed up everything important and useful that I learned while in college, and made it into this book (and also a popular lecture).
Basically, this book could have saved me 6 years of expense and emotional torment if it hadn't been released the very year I graduated from college. If you know someone who is in college studying art or something creative, someone who is interested in studying something like art, or someone who is simply passionate about creating things, please get them this book. It's quite impossible for me to review a book like this, but basically it says what I would want to tell anyone - or rather everyone - who has that creative gift. It's reassuring to read this book and be told that, yeah! Your guilty pleasures like video games and comic books? Even though they aren't considered high art, if you get some inspiration from them then by all means - do not give them up! They contribute to something bigger and very personal for you. You like to write fan-fiction? Who hasn't written fan-fiction at one time? Keep writing! The reassuring message is just to keep going!
For instance, I keep a "sketch diary." This is a personal and extremely honest little book where I draw auto-biographic comic strips about my day, emotions, anxieties, etc. I keep scads of notebooks - I'm a notebook collector. Every book serves a certain purpose. In fact, I cannot leave my house without a notebook, pen, and highlighter. I use it for "collecting" or "stealing." I did this even before reading this little book, but that's exactly what this little book encourages. Because from my sketch diary to my note-collecting, all of this is research, and it is very telling. For one thing, collecting like this has become a very vital and important habit I've formed. It is in essence why I am an artist at heart. Not because I've been one of the best drawers in my class all through my formative years.
In a sense, everyone who owns a Tumblr blog is keeping a notebook. Everyone who has a Pintrest account is too. But you're not an artist unless you try them out for yourself, and only then when you forgive yourself for not making a perfect imitation of those cookie monster cupcakes, for example.
But enough about me. Let Austin Kleon tell you himself what this book is about: