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!
