Book Review: Finding Your Inspiration by Ian Fennelly

Ian Fennelly is an artist, instructor and urban sketcher based in UK. He's a prolific artist who loves sketching on locations and also teaches urban sketching workshops around the world through Urban Sketch Course.

Finding Your Inspiration is a more of a personal rather than instructional artbook that collects the sketches Ian has created around the world in these places:

• Liverpool
• London
• Paris
• Venice Edinburgh
• Amsterdam
• Porto
• San Antonio
• Tuscany
• Wales
• Cornwall
• Germany
• Deal
• Robin Hood's Bay
• Santa Fe
• Barcelona
• Mexico

His style is quite recognisable. I live the details he's able to capture in the scenes. His use of watercolour is loose and used mostly to call attention to certain areas. And there's this sense of whimsy that gives his sketches this caricature style.

The commentary talks about the places he sketched and also the inspiration behind those sketches. The last chapter talks about several incidents where he lost the mode to sketch while on location and I can totally relate to those downer incidents.

This book looks like self published print-on-demand publication. It's large format paperback with 156 pages. The sketches are wonderfully reproduced and the colours look lovely. The only downside is the sketches that were printed across the gutter cannot be seen properly as this is not a book where the pages can open completely flat. The sketches are lovely and I just hate that I can't see the sketches properly across the page gutter.

If you like this book, check out his two other books Layers of Looking and Sketching Stories, and other urban sketching books I've featured.

Here are direct links to the book:
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr | Amazon.it | Amazon.es | Amazon.com.au | Amazon.co.jp