Customer Reviews

Pencil Sketching, 2nd Edition

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

 

 

I remember the first edition of this book from a few years ago. But this new edition is beautiful in and of itself - I flip through it often. But the real bonus was that it inspired me to sketch again - a skill that I haven't used frequently in the past ten or fifteen years. This one's a keeper because it showed me *how* to do it and then showed examples of how it was done by the expert. I've rediscovered my love of sketching.

A great book.

So many art books give long-winded descriptions of what to do, and even how to do it, yet they fail to capture the essence of what makes a drawing good. Wang concentrates on simple elements and rules of thumb, providing a wealth of wisdom in a few words and pictures.

If you're looking for long descriptions of techniques, this is not the book for you. The author quickly notes the salient points and demonstrates with sketches.

This book has beautiful drawings and covers a variety of techniques: how to hold a pencil, line, composition, values and shading, etc. The author also leads you through how to make specific elements: landforms, trees, water, and more.

I was recommended this book by an instructor and I was not disappointed. It focuses on physical sketching technique (great for beginners/people returning to sketching) and a casual but effective style that is perfect for quick landscape/plant sketches. Not intimidating at all!

As a drawing instructor and a professional sketch artist I am always on the look out for information on this topic. This book has a lot of useful information and quality art. Wang has written many good books about drawing over the years. "Pencil Sketching" is one more thoughtful effort from a very knowledgeable guy. I share his passion for making graphite marks on a "toothy" paper.

Although not so obvi­ous from the title, Pen­cil Sketch­ing is really about sketch­ing land­scapes and archi­tec­ture. It's a pretty great book with so many great sketches that it makes you want to get out there and draw noth­ing but buildings!

In this book, Wang gives a solid overview of pen­cil use, the strokes pro­duced by var­i­ous kinds of pen­cils and dif­fer­ent grips and hand/arm move­ments for sketch­ing. What I really liked was the sam­ples and exer­cises of strokes that are use­ful for sketch­ing land­scapes and build­ings. Some might find this overly sim­plis­tic, but as a begin­ner, I thought it was useful!

In gen­eral, the book has quite lit­tle text but lots of sketches. Most of the impor­tant lessons in the book are explained through sketches; for exam­ples, how to shade to cre­ate con­trast and give the impres­sion of depth. In fact, the whole last chap­ter (all 20 pages of it) only has exam­ples of Wang's sketches. How­ever, even with­out text, the book has a lot of use­ful lessons. If you hate read­ing, this is def­i­nitely a good book for you! I, on the other hand, LOVE read­ing so I wish this book had more pages for me to read.

Read my full review with pictures on my website: [...]

I recommend this book for any artists library and for schools that teach drawing, sketching, illustration, etc.. It deals with the topic of "Depth and Perspective" better than most sketching books I've seen.

39 of the 111 pages consist of full page printed sketches, wich are beautiful. But the text, which is very rare in this book, is sometimes missing, and throughout this book very superficially. Thomas C. Wang describes one (1) pencil technique, which he is using for his sketchings, other methodes are not discussed or even mentioned. I could not recommend this book to anyone, perhaps for very beginning artist, whom are uncertainly in leading a pencil, but even then there are better books.

Received the book and it was torn at the top several pages almost as it had been ripped, kept because living in Hawaii some things arent worth pursuing. Would recommend the seller take better care in packing items.