Product Description

*Artists of all skill levels will find tips and techniques to help them develop their craft

*17 step-by-step demonstrations make complex techniques easy to understand

*Provides fundamental skills that translate into other mediums

Absolute beginners and those looking for a refresher course will find this book to be a wonderful tool. The authors, Mark and Mary Willenbrink, have created a series of exercises which take the reader from the basic fundamentals of drawing to the complexities of creating landscapes, still lifes, people and much more. With encouraging words and an emphasis on having fun, each exercise is designed to build confidence. Complicated concepts are explained in a clear, understandable manner so that even the novice artist will feel inspired to try. Before long, readers will find themselves drawing with a confidence they never imagined.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2679 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781581807899
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

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.

Customer Reviews

The One to Get!!
I discovered this unassuming volume after buying four other drawing books and looking through about fifty others. 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!

Very Traditional Approach to Pencil Drawing
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!

Great Book
This is a great book for the beginning artist. The book is easy to follow and clearly lays out techniques and materials needed.