Customer Rating:  
Summary: A Good Beginners' Buide
Comment: Over the last six month I have been buying a number of instructional book on drawing/sketching for reference. I have found this one to be one that I continue to go back to to review approaches to getting started. I would recommend it as a good guide for a beginner -- either to drawing or to starting with charcoal and graphite.
Leon
Customer Rating:
Summary: a perfect intro
Comment: i like the philosophy of this book..not only concentrating on technical details, which is boring for someone like me who only takes drawing as a hobby. also, this book is not too general. there is some essential points stated in each chapter, with fun 'project' accompanied, to provide concrete example and opportunity to practice. quite good!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Comment: Although the artwork in the book varies in beauty, the teaching is superb. And that, after all, is the most important thing. I've been drawing for nearly half a century, but these keys have pushed my drawing to an entirely new level. How these little secrets evaded me for so long is mysterious! Pity I didn't have this book when I was a kid. My life might have been very different.
Customer Rating:
Summary: kick in the pants
Comment: I am an artist who allowed herself to put the responsibilities of life before her passion. I have been trying to rekindle my passion for drawing and painting after twenty years of " I'll make time tomorrow" excuses. I originally began drawing as a small child and fine tuned my skills in school with an instructor who used the Betty Edwards approach, so i tried using her books to "get back into art". Well, i love her approach, but the scientific instruction of how and why to draw are interesting, but reading about all that takes time away from what makes great art- simply just doing it. Keys to drawing was exactly the kick in the pants I needed to stop reading about art and start creating again. This book gets you drawing right away and gives you so many exercises and so much encouragement to just draw. I love the illustrations in the book because they are not perfect, they are real and show you the process of creating a drawing instead of making you feel intimidated by professionally drawn finished products, although there are a few of those. The author gives you permission to make mistakes, actually encouraging you to do so in order to find your own style and get over yourself and just have fun.I highly recommend this book to All age groups and level of artist.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good basics on freeform drawing.
Comment: This is a freeform drawing book that teaches draw what you see and not what you know, using the language of lines and shapes and not the language of things (very much like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain).
Chapter 1 covers the drawing process and reviews the main points in a bulleted list at the end. Chapter 2 discusses the "handwriting" of famous artists - most interesting and enlightening. Chapter 3 covers how to draw figures and faces - here it does teach about foreshortening, finding midpoints, and taking measurements. Chapter 4 covers how to use light and shadow to model shapes. Chapter 5 covers precision drawing principles: how to create depth, eye level and vanishing points (one and two point perspective), unusual perspectives, ellipses. However, it's more of an overview rather than a "how to." Don't rely on this to learn precision drawing. Chapter 6 covers textures. Chapter 7 discusses composition (pattern and design). Chapter 8 covers imaginative drawing.
This is an excellent book to learn freeform drawing - I'm not sure what's better, this book or the "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain", but I think I would still like to have this in my art book library.
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