Book Review: 365 Hints & Tips for Drawing & Sketching

Here's a book I received from Page One Publishing. It was on my shopping list initially.

There are actually two publishers for the book. Page One Publishing is distributing this book for Asia under the title 365 Hints & Tips for Drawing & Sketching while North Light Books has it as Drawing 365: Tips and Techniques to Build Your Confidence and Skills. They have different covers.

The author is Katherine Tyrrell who's also the blogger for the rather popular art blog called Making a Mark. She also draws and paints and some of her artworks are in the book.

As the title of the book suggest, it features a bunch of hints and tips on drawing. The idea is to use one of these tips each day, to try something different, have a new artist endeavour, explore, experiment. It's more like a motivational book to get you to draw day, and in fact some of the text are motivational tips.

You'll need basic drawing skills to get the most out of the book because the book does not cover much on the techniques.

It's a fun book to follow along and you can create your drawing schedules using the ideas provided. The book is split into three parts. The first covers the basics, second on the subject matter that you can draw and third on materials you can try out.

There are many interesting and useful tips, such as on tackling pet commissions, how to light a still life, draw buildings without understanding perspective, mixing up your drawing medium, ideas on places to draw, things to look out for when drawing certain subjects and the book also covers the basic art fundamentals like observational drawing, composition, proportion, etc. It's a book you can dive into on any page. I like the variety of tips even though some are rather brief but still useful nevertheless.

It's a good book for those who like drawing and sketching.

If you like this book, also check out Freehand: Sketching Tips and Tricks Drawn from Art, Playing with Sketches and Just Draw It!. They are also books on ideas and exploration.

Drawing 365: Tips and Techniques to Build Your Confidence and Skills is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

There are different publishers for this book. Mine's the one published by Page One for Asia. The other is by Apple Press.