Customer Reviews

All About Techniques in Drawing (All about Techniques: Art)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I purchased this book because it provides a quick and dirty run down of the different forms of media one can use to draw a picture. In the first section of the book, it talks about the tools you can use: graphite, colored pencils, pastels, ink, markers, charcoal and sanguine-just to name a few. It also tells you what type of paper goes best with each drawing material as well as the type of eraser is best to use. There is a section value and modeling, as well. The next couple of the sections deal with techiques that are specific to each medium. For example, coloring by strokes and blending charcoal and pastels with fingers and stumping pencils. In the sections on techniques, step-by-step exercises are provided to demonstrate how the author got from a blank sheet of paper to a replication of a famous work of art done in that same medium. However, during the demonstrations (I assume in the interests of brevity and page space)he may skip a little too much. This may not bother some people, but I'm a "I follow the recipie to the letter" type of person when it comes to something I don't know how to do. In spite of that I still rate this book 5 stars for several reasons: I like they way they show you pictures of the tools and tell you what they are and how to use them (for example, my high school art teacher said under no circumstances to smudge with my fingers for shading--he mainly said to crosshatch. As a result, I had no idea what a stumping pencil was and that my fingers were capable of such nice smudging.) Secondly, I like the way the book mentions some of the top brands for different media and shows what some of these sets look like. And thirdly, despite the flaw in the exercises, it was still fascinating to see the transformation. (I haven't done one to completion as I've only had the book for two weeks and I wanted to read through it first.) After reading the book, I know what materials I need to get started and I have a manual to help me practice.

I've always been pretty good at basic to intermediate graphite sketches and I wanted to take my drawings to the next level. If you're a beginner or an advanced beginner, then this book will probably help you. If everything I have written here is old hat to you, then you should probably look for something more advanced. As I said this book is a quick and dirty break-down of different drawing media and their techinques. It does not attempt to give in depth information on all media and the techniques associated with them.

I'm glad I got this book through my local library, because it was not nearly as useful as I'd hoped. The text is small, dense and tight, making it difficult to read, and the writing style is fussily academic rather than practical. I got the feeling that it was more important to the writers to spout off information bytes A, B, and C than to make sure it was really comprehended by either writer or reader. "There, we covered it; now you can go take the test." The sections on much of the media covered are so brief and generalized that you really don't know that much more after reading them. I think it would be better to get higher quality books dedicated to each topic, but even as an overview this book fails.

I actually gave up on reading it through as I had originally planned because the small type size literally hurt my eyes. I just flipped through after the first couple chapters. The sections on each medium tend to contain rather dogmatic statements such as "It is important to bear in mind that colored pencils provide the best results when they are used as a drawing medium rather than as a painting medium" (p60). I feel that, firstly, artists generally know to avoid such statements of absolute "can't" as some upstart is sure to prove them wrong, and secondly, it's likely that advances in media manufacture will eventually render many such statements obsolete. They are statements of opinion given out as fact. In the artist's world, "rules" are for breaking!

There has got to be a better general manual on drawing out there, somewhere. At the very least, one with bigger text.

Awsome book, i recemend it to all