Both experienced and aspiring artists can benefit from this practical guide, which shows how to portray rustic settings from rural England to the American Southwest. Recalling the style of Eric Sloane, more than 400 detailed illustrations trace the steps from composition drawings to final sketches. Includes fundamentals for drawing trees, rocks, buildings, mountains, lakes, and other scenic elements.
Part of the Learn to Draw series, this book looks at drawing country scenes. All the basics are covered, to provide a sound foundation in drawing techniques, and numerous illustrations and step-by-step drawings show how these are put into practice. Each book includes information on tools and equipment, proportion and shapes, light and shade, structure and form, composition and working from photographs.
A facility with pencil drawings is a valuable asset for painters in oil and watercolors, and a high-quality pencil sketch ranks as the artistic equal of the best painting. This guide offers beginners step-by-step demonstrations of how to depict clouds, trees, buildings, and other outdoor scenes.Famed for his landscape paintings, author Leonard Richmond provides pencil studies that demonstrate each stage of picture-making, from rough sketch to completed work. Students who copy and memorize the simpler studies can advance to the more complicated pictures, attaining skills that will assist them in drawing directly from life or nature. Using a variety of pencil techniques, Richmond shows how to re-create stormy and tranquil skies, foliage, driftwood and rocks along the seashore, and other outdoor scenery. Students will savor the rich diversity of these illustrative landscapes, which include scenes from England's Cornish coast, a homestead in New Mexico, a Vermont meadow, and the French countryside.
The act of field sketching allows us to experience the landscape first-hand – rather than reliance upon plans, maps and photographs at a distance, back in the studio. Aimed primarily at landscape architects, Janet Swailes takes the reader on a journey through the art of field sketching, providing guidance and tips to develop skills from those starting out on a design course, to those looking to improve their sketching. Combining techniques from landscape architecture and the craft and sensibilities of arts practice, she invites us to experience sensations directly out in the field to enrich our work: to look closely at the effects of light and weather; understand the lie and shapes of the land through travel and walking; and to consider lines of sight from the inside out as well as outside in. Full colour throughout with examples, checklists and case studies of other sketchers’ methods, this is an inspirational book to encourage landscape architects to spend more time in the field and reconnect with the basics of design through drawing practice.
Drawing from Life explores revolutionary drawing and sketching in the early People’s Republic of China (1949–1965) in order to discover how artists created a national form of socialist realism. Tracing the development of seminal works by the major painters Xu Beihong, Wang Shikuo, Li Keran, Li Xiongcai, Dong Xiwen, and Fu Baoshi, author Christine I. Ho reconstructs how artists grappled with the representational politics of a nascent socialist art. The divergent approaches, styles, and genres presented in this study reveal an art world that is both heterogeneous and cosmopolitan. Through a history of artistic practices in pursuit of Maoist cultural ambitions—to forge new registers of experience, new structures of feeling, and new aesthetic communities—this original book argues that socialist Chinese art presents a critical, alternative vision for global modernism.
This clear and concise guide to pen-and-ink work presents 37 step-by-step illustrations that progress from pencil sketch to ink outline to shadows and details to completed work. Written in a direct, engaging style and richly illustrated, its drawings range from easy to complex and offer guidance for artists at every level.
Walking one day in the woods behind her cottage in Devon, nature illustrator and blogger Jo Brown became captivated by the sight of a Green Dock Beetle on a leaf and took a photograph of it in order to be able to draw it. That first tiny emerald bug was followed by more insects, and then birds, fungi, plants and flowers. The result is Secrets of a Devon Wood, a rich illustrated memory of her discoveries in the order in which she encountered them, so that the book flows smoothly with the seasons and the emergence of different wildlife. In enchanting, minute detail she zooms in on a bog beacon mushroom, a buff-tailed bumblebee, or a native bluebell. And she notes facts about their physiology and life history: "The flowers are narrow & darker than H. hispanica & H.x. mossartiana," she writes. "Drooping stem. Almost all flowers are on one side. Sweet scent." This journal is a treat for the senses, both a hymn to the intricate beauty of the natural world and a quiet call to arms for all of us to acknowledge and preserve it. It is a book that will stay with you long after you finally put it down
