Drawing for the Absolute Beginner: A Clear & Easy Guide to Successful Drawing [Paperback]

Mark Willenbrink (Author), Mary Willenbrink (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2, 2006

This inspiring book makes drawing in a realistic style easier than you may think and more fun than you ever imagined!

Authors Mark and Mary Willenbrink (Watercolor for the Absolute Beginner) cover it all—from choosing materials and the correct way to hold your pencil, to expert advice on the tricky stuff, like getting proportions and perspective right, drawing reflections, and designing strong compositions. (It's not as scary as it sounds…not with Mark and Mary as your guide!)

At the heart of this book, a series of fun, hands-on exercises help you practice and perfect your strokes—24 mini-demos lead up to 9 full step-by-step demos. Each exercise builds on the previous one as you develop your skills, build your confidence, and enjoy yourself along the way. The lessons you learn by drawing simple subjects such as coffee mugs, clouds and trees will help you take on progressively more challenging matter like animals, still lifes, landscapes and portraits…the kinds of subjects and scenes you've always dreamt of drawing.

This book is just the ticket for budding artists of any age. It's never too early and never too late to discover the pure joy of drawing!

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Mark and Mary Willenbrink are also the authors of North Light's Watercolor for the Absolute Beginner. Mark teaches watercolor classes and is a contributing editor for Watercolor Magic magazine. Mary is a writer, with a Masters Degree in Counseling.

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: North Light Books (November 2, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1581807899
• ISBN-13: 978-1581807899
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 0.4 x 11 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (60 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,060 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #7 in Books > Arts & Photography > Drawing

More About the Author

Mark Willenbrink writes and illustrates articles for watercolour magazines and teaches courses on drawing and watercolour techniques. He started as a commercial artist, worked as a freelance illustrator and is now a full-time artist.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

350 of 353 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The One to Get!! October 11, 2007

By R. P. Jones

Format:Paperback

I discovered this unassuming volume after buying four other drawing books and looking through about fifty more. While finding a lot of good things in the other books, none of them had what I was looking for in a beginner's guide - a solid step-by-step foundation course starting from square one. Too many drawing books, I learned, either turned into art displays - filled with beautifully rendered drawings and too little instruction, focused too much on certain aspects of drawing at the exclusion of others, or were poorly organized with a vague sense of direction. What I wanted was a solid stone on which to build my drawing and (eventually) painting skills...and I found it!

Where Mr. and Mrs. Willenbrink have succeeded so magnificently is in both the completeness and organization of their material. They assume nothing while providing valuable insight on every page. Their goal is to get you drawing - quickly and correctly. Not a word is wasted on lofty theories and no drawings are displayed without full and easy-to-follow instructions on how they were created. This is a book that will teach you how to walk before trying to teach you how to run.

The book's six chapters are laid out clearly and logically, starting with how to hold the pencil and a great overview of sketch types. From there the chapters cover basic shapes, measurement and perspective, value, and composition, with over 25 step-by-step practice drawings to apply what has been discussed.

I could not find a better presentation of this material in any other drawing book. If you dream of being an artist and don't know where to begin...start here!

157 of 164 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Traditional Approach to Pencil Drawing October 24, 2008

By K. Draper TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

This book is one of four instructional drawing books which I bought to try to get myself back into sketching and drawing, an activity which I enjoyed in my youth. Besides the "Absolute Beginner" book, I got the "Absolute and Utter Beginner", "Drawing with Children" (Mona Brookes) plus one about drawing faces. As you can see, I decided to go "all the way back" and get a good foundation to the craft. I draw nearly every day now, doing up to seven sketches or studies. My fat little sketchbook is half full now with studies from the "Face Book", still life pictures I've done of stuff in my room, and many drawings from the Willenbrink book. I dove right into this book and have been mostly pleased with it.

The book starts begins with a list of basic tools and supplies. It fits the bill for those who are looking for a guide to strictly pencil drawings (not colored ones, charcoal or ink or pastels: I'll do that later), and requires few supplies. Hobby Lobby had some small kits with most of the stuff in them: various pencils---from soft to hard, a little sharpener, plus a sandpaper pad to put a fine point on your pencil, and two kinds of erasers. Besides that you need sketchbook(s), a nice drawing board, and some drafting-type tools---an "eraser shield", folding ruler, triangle, t-square, and "dividers". Be sure to pick up a spray-can of fixative so that your drawings don't get all smudged onto the pages of your book, and pick up a hem-gauge from a fabric store.

Chapter One which introduces Sketching and Drawing was very helpful to get me thinking about art and "seeing" with artist eyes. In fact, I would like to have spent more time on these exercises and others ones like that.... You learn ways to hold the pencil, and some types of stokes you can make, then moves on to structural sketches, value sketches, black-white sketches, contour sketches, and finally combining these approaches for a "finished" product. The same two models, a coffee mug and a man's face were used in each exercise, which was great because it gave you the chance to look at the same thing in several ways--like blocking out the shapes, simplifying it into just black and white or line drawing without looking at your paper, or even drawing from memory with your eyes closed.

OK and now unto the "basics", which in this case means: draftsmanship-- mostly perspective, and lots of it. This is important if you want your drawings to look realistic, but I find it to be dry and a bit intimidating, so I didn't get very far into it yet. Since I wasn't ready to do this stuff, I thought I'd have to set the book aside, but after thumbing through it, I found some projects I could do without studying the prospective stuff. I have done the exercises on drawing a standing cat, a cat face, human faces, trees, and drawing and shading stones, and others. I liked how the author listed which sections in the book you needed to have studied to be ready to do each project.

All-in-all I found this method book to be not only basic, but rather formulaic. A finished project was shown, prefaced by three or four steps of how the artist gets to that point. This is helpful if you like to "copy" art--which I do, but, so far I don't think that my pictures have really improved that much yet, nor do I FEEL artistic yet. I'll continue to use this book, but I'm going to use the other method books now, too, to round out my learning, because I am intrigued by the other approaches and drawing exercises. Must--get--those--creative--juices--flowing! I hope that helps! Read more ›

78 of 80 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Quite Helpful But Not For The "Absolute Beginner" September 16, 2010

By Anne-Marie Gallagher

Format:Paperback

I like this book quite a lot. I got it as a review of basic drawing principles I learned in college, and for this it is really useful. It reviews much of what I learned in the first four art classes I had, explaining tools, going over basic skills like how to hold a pencil for different effects, creating value cards, and starting out with the basic shapes of an item and working towards the details. I'd forgotten many pointers my profs had shared that are repeated here, like how to use a sighting stick and what the basic proportions are for the human face and body. The demos/how-to's also cover a good range, including human and animal portraits, buildings, cars, a fruit still life, and a couple landscapes.

While I have never been a "natural" in terms of drawing, I have had 7 college drawing courses and three adult-ed classes at an art center in the last few years. This is to say, while this book is actually perfect for me, providing meaningful instruction and review at my present (still beginner) level, I think I would have been very upset and overwhelmed with it had I gotten it a few years ago, before taking any of the aforementioned classes. Likewise, you will notice that many of the other reviewers who got the most out of the book actually have some drawing background. The discussion of perspective is a great review, for example, but had this been my first introdution to perspective, I would have been competely lost, as the disussion is more an overview of the concept than the step-by-step tutorial that a real "absolute beginner" needs to follow.... A good 20+ pages of the 128 page book deals with perspective either as its main focus or as a needed skill to follow the demo, including the demos on drawing planes, trains, and automobiles, as well as plotting shadows and drawing ellipses. Thus while I heartily recommend this book, I would reserve it for the person who has a little more background than an "absolute beginner" lest one become discouraged by attempting to follow instructions that are not sufficiently detailed for one with no previous knowledge of perspective. Read more ›