How to Draw: drawing and sketching objects and environments from your imagination

Absolutely fundamental book, a stunningly thorough guide to drawing, for fun or for work. From techniques, daily practices and equipment to methodology, mindset and a wealth of examples, this book gives you all you the stepping stones you need to take your skills to whatever level you want. Just simply a masterclass in drawing, specifically construction drawing, you'll be hard pressed to find anything more thorough and pedagogical anywhere.

This book is very much worth its weight in gold. For the reviewers who say this is not a beginner book, well, I started this book as a beginner. The only thing I knew about perspective was that items get smaller the further they are and that anything above the horizon line angles downward towards the vanishing point and anything under the horizon line angles upwards towards the vanishing point. Now I know how to multiply using perspective, work with planes, create grids and build objects with volume. I'm not saying that this is an easy read. This is a book that I needed to pick apart page by page. I worked every exercise and spent at least 2 hours each night studying it. If I found that I was struggling with an exercise for too long, I would move ahead to the next exercise and when done, I would go back to the previous exercise and try again. Yes, some of the example exercises could have been more helpful, such as providing us with the angles of the left and right vanishing points (because a lot of my working samples ended up very skewed). I found that by tracing the example from the book, I could then work the exercise easier. I then would practice it multiple times before I moved on. Tracing paper was a must have because I would first draft the base construction, then use tracing paper to finish it off. That way I could practice over and over without having to start from scratch. This helped the concepts to embed themselves in my brain. And yes, my brain hurt a lot when reviewing this book. :-) The key thing here is, practice, repeat and move on. If you are not a persone who has the patience to stick with something, then this book may not be for you. It took me 2 months to go through this book. But then again, I was obsessed with it and studied it thoroughly. I still am not able to draw a vehicle that looks road or air-worthy, but I have the baseline and now it will just take time and practice to continue to improve. The youtube videos were extremely helpful as well. Yes, it would have been nice to be able to cast the videos on the TV instead of being restricted to viewing them on my mobile device, but hey, we had videos which were a nice touch! This book has been one of the best art books that I have ever purchased.

This book is just fantastic and is utterly a case of you get out of it what you put in. I have spent time daily in it over the past 4 months, working through it with every bit of dedication I gave my previous mechanical engineering studies and I have benefited massively. If you approach it with your sleeves rolled up and constantly try out what you read on paper, you'll grow a lot artistically. It is also utterly essential that you go through the videos, from which you will learn as much, if not more, than from the book (a link and pswrd is provided in the book); here is where you actually see the author drawing, and can really analyze his movements and methods, and he drops a lot of hints and tricks. I took copious notes as I went through these, and worked along in parallel as I watched. The attached show some of the drawings I produced based on Scott's instructions (I clearly still have a long ways to go, but would never have believed could have created these several months ago!). There are certain themes that come up over and over again which you can't help but absorb, much like taking a class. If this is your only reference and you are determined to rigorously understand perspective, I think you'll find the explanations to be less than complete, and the organize of chapters 2 thru 4 to be less than perfect. Broad principles are not so much stated as they are demonstrated; I didn't mind this challenge, though, and it made me go deep with the subject and extract what I saw as the unifying principles (this is in regard to understanding line convergence in general 3D space). I got to the bottom of this by working through my own derivations. The author demonstrates really fantastic craftsmanship, artistry, and creativity, and is a very strong communicator. I wish he got a little more pumped up/energetic in the videos, but I suppose the quality and volume of his work speak to his profound underlying passion for it. He manages to break down complex constructions to be utterly doable. Amazing. Right now I am starting in on the sequel "How to Render". Overall, I think this is a simply fantastic track to get on if you are a beginning and want to massively improve your drawing skills; going this direction you are basically aligning with a top instructor from one of the best design institutes in the world (Art Center College of Design). We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Mr. Robertson for this work.

I put off buying this book because of reviews that said it's too advanced and/or doesn't explain certain sections properly. I bought this book anyway and I couldn't of been happier. I am breezing through this book and learning great techniques. I'm not finished with it, but I've started studying from this book and have done a flip through of every chapter. All of it is in my skill level. I have basic knowledge of 1, 2, 3 and 4 pt perspective. If I look at a cube, I can tell you what perspective it is in, an approximation of where the vanishing points are, and if the cube is higher/lower than the horizon line. I can freehand cubes and rectangular planes well. If I didn't have that prior basic knowledge down, yeah this book would give me a headache. But there's lots of great YouTube tutorials that will teach you those basics so you can then move on to this book. Highly recommend, I can't believe I put off buying this book for so long. Such great knowledge in here. 10/10 for me.

This is a fantastic reference for anyone who desires to learn the basics of sketching in perspective. Perspective drawing is the key focus on this book, but it also does a good job at showing how perspective in your drawing compares to scenes in reality. There are other books out there that teach things that are shown well in this book, but the thing that I think makes this one unique is that it brings so many different aspects of perspective, sketching, and object design together in one place. And while it doesn't include every technique available to a designer or artist, this explains a tremendous toolset that you'll be able to use (very quickly!) to produce most anything you can imagine. Isn't that the goal? The quality of the book is fantastic (I got the "paperback" version) with some of the thickest paper of any book I own. Each page is in full color (most publishers would have cut corners as many of the images only include spots of color and the temptation to make it greyscale had to be high). Also included is a link list to video lessons. There is an upcoming app that will allow you to scan images from many of the pages to trigger the videos, but it's not yet available on iOS or Google Play store (at least it didn't show up as linked from the QR code and separate searches). The link list works with your computer or a tablet. I'll update this review when the app becomes available. If you are unfamiliar with Scott Robertson, I highly recommend searching for him in YouTube. I've been following him for years and have 7 of his drawing, rendering, and designing DVDs from the Gnomon workshop. This book and the videos is a nice companion to those, but much less expensive! (Those DVDs were $30 each). Even with that background, I'm very happy with Scott's latest book.

It took me a while, but I finally got through this textbook. Overall, I feel that this book is relatively well-rounded and does what it promises: Teaches you the basics as well as the advanced techniques used to draw objects and environments accurately. What this book does NOT do is teach anatomy, so if that is your goal, turn away, you're looking at the wrong book. Essentially, this book teaches how professionals do precise measurements in order to draw things in 3D space, and what techniques they use to fill in the empty spaces that most beginners would be unable to draw. It teaches things like perspective, mirroring or copying, and proportions between objects. Unfortunately, even though the lessons aren't too difficult to follow through, there is a huge lack of practical learning. The book doesn't give you any practice lessons to try to solve. It's just designed as a reference book for you to go back to whenever you're actually drawing and need to use a technique to draw something specific. This makes it really hard to learn the concepts in the books, since you'll often not need to or won't want to go out of your way just to use them. I draw fantastical environments, and I actually found it time-consuming to adhere to the techniques used in the book. Sure, they are the "right way" of drawing things in 3D space, but unless you're creating art for professional purposes, a lot of the techniques are unnecessary and can be substituted by perspective, eyeballing, and feel. The book promises that it will teach you how to draw anything you can imagine, but the part of the book that teaches about visual libraries (developing unique ideas) was seriously lacking. I was disappointed by this. It doesn't really teach anything that others out there haven't described already. It's still the adage of "look up all sorts of keywords and take idea from each one." I suppose this is the general truth, but Feng Zhu teaches about it much better in his free video lessons. Overall, I recommend this book only if you need to learn the industry techniques used for more advanced applications such as architectural drawing or professional concept art. If you are a casual artist, don't bother; just get any ordinary perspective book (or even just learn about that online) and eyeball the rest that you can't figure out. Also, don't bother buying the sequel book (How to Render) unless you actually need it. It's completely different and delves more into the field of concept art.

Purchased this book secondhand. Book showed minimal signs of wear, otherwise in great shape. Shipping was very fast! A very comprehensive guide to drawing shapes, planes, vehicles, environments, in perspective.Can't wait to read and study this during the summer.

I actually REALLY love this book! I tried to refund it after making a sudden impulse buy, but when I received it, I ended up keeping it. Super informative, and it also comes with an app where you can scan the page and it plays helpful videos. I personally have a hard time learning from books because there usually isn't enough visual aid. But the explanation videos are incredibly helpful, and make it a worthwhile purchase compared to other books on Amazon. If you're debating about learning between a book, or free from the internet, I say ONLY buy this book if you're stuck and learning from the internet isn't helping. Too many times I'll buy a new art book just for it to gather dust and look cool on a shelf, lol. I bought mine used and it came in practically looking brand new.

O produto chegou em perfeitas condições. É um livro completo do básico ao avançado com ótimos exercícios, recomendo!

At first I was hesitant to make the purchase due to the focus on machines. Like cars, etc. But, with art, these skills are transferrable. Cars are easy because we're all familiar with them, however the skills taught here can be used to draw big crazy robots and mechs. Futuristic sci-fi cities, and even fantasy settings. This is a great book and I recommend it to anyone of any level. There's LOTS of content in there, so it's even good value.

I come from an engineering background but was always interested in learning proper 3D sketching and design process of products (mainly automotive). This book explains everything in a very easy to follow way. you start with very basic form finding and then work your way through to lighting and some basics of rendering (How to Render is obviously is what you need to learn about proper rendering). The video tutorials that are linked to different parts of the book are also amazing. You can totally tell this book has been written by someone who not only has the knowledge but also knows how to transfer that knowledge. Used many different books and video tutorials but only two really stood out. This book and the H-Point. Both absolute must haves and totally worth the price (even more so if you find them sale). Invaluable additions to any engineer/designer's library.

Llego en tiempo y forma. Todo en buen estado. Las pastas y hojas son de bastante buena calidad. Y el contenido del libro es muy rico en información.

Otroligt detaljerad lärobok, ibland lite väl detaljerad men man lär sig mycket om nyanser, 3d och just hur detaljer är viktigt för att ge en bild liv. Jag har nyss börjat med den men hoppas jag ska lyckas gå igenom den till Jul.