Book Review: Freehand Drawing and Discovery: Urban Sketching and Concept Drawing for Designers

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Freehand Drawing and Discovery is a book on sketching. Written by James Richards, a member of Urban Sketchers, the book is a collection of tips and insight on sketching.

The tips are practical and accompanied by many beautiful examples from the author and other guest artists. There are info on creating textures, drawing simple figures in perspective, understanding what can be added to make a good picture, etc.

It's not a totally hands-on tutorial book so you'll need to know how to draw first at a basic level. The book is more like a supplement to help you improve your observation and understanding of the scene.

There are various guest artists interviews with Michael Vergason, Kevin Sloan, Luis Ruiz, Gabriel Campanario, Liz Steel and others. They share their stories and experiences and you can understand easily why they are thrilled by sketching, and be inspired by them.

The latter chapters cover more experimental sketching, like using the Google Sketchup 3D software for reference, and sketching over photographs.

The book also includes more than an hour of helpful online tutorial videos.

It's an inspiring book. Highly recommended to everyone who sketches.

Freehand Drawing and Discovery: Urban Sketching and Concept Drawing for Designers is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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5 Comments

I literally just ordered this

I literally just ordered this book a day before this review went up. I'm glad to see you consider it a worthy purchase as this particular tome is quite expensive in comparison to similar available works.

I just bought this on a

I just bought this on a recommendation from Paul Wang and from this blog. However, I got so excited, I forgot to purchase through Parka Blogs. This is a great blog and we should remember to purchase our art books through here. I saw 'Parka' give away a book today....very nice! Bad me...will try to do better.

Hi Parka,

Hi Parka,
Thanks to this book that I found your blog. It is amazingly inspiring to see all this when I am trying to get back to sketching again. I just want to know that if I click your amazon link here and buy the digital edition, will you still get the credit?

I just purchased this book

I just purchased this book through your parka blog link. I have been looking at several different books on urban sketching . This is the one I settled on. I can't wat for it to arrive.

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