Cityscape

Sort of suckish...

Just working on my perspective drawing so far this is the most detailed view of a city I could do, it's not that good but since I'm still working on catching the details with my mind's eyes I suppose it's okay.

So while I was trying to figure out how to improve my knowledge in drawing backgrounds and such, I have decided to look for a book that would help me out, I know what you are thinking, why waste money? why not just look for some tutorials on the internet? and at first I did. I have even look at videos to know how the artists do this, but I have noticed that sure this might work for some and I would be lying if I say I did not learn a thing or two from those online tutorials and demonstrations because honestly I did. I have just decided to look for a book such as this book shown at the left image because I like to have a solid reference, an item that I could take anywhere and just flip open when I'm bored or just relaxing, I don't need an electronic device and the internet just to look for what I need, plus I love reading books, it's definitely less stressing on the eye than looking on LED monitors for hours I could honestly prove that. Anyway moving on, first before I continue let me just state here that I am not an official critic on this book and the review I'm about to write is based on my personal opinion so bare with me here. This book on the left entitled "the Landscape Artist's Drawing Bible" edited by Hazel Harrison seems to be a great help to new, amateur and professional artists alike. I bought this book at a local bookstore around my city area but it could also be bought at amazon or other book shopping sites, it cost P450 so that's about $10 or higher if it's online or bought in another country. I like how it's spiral-bound rather than hardbound making it a lot easier to open and flip over and it's glossy, I don't know why I like glossy paper but I just do. The book covers a lot of mediums in drawing landscapes from pencil, charcoal, watercolor to paint so it would really be a great tool for any artist whatever medium one uses. The tutorials are easy to understand and well written, it even provides sample images of the process making it a lot easier to follow and comprehend.

Sample Medium [Paste] and different shading techniques

Here is a sample image of what it looks inside the book, on this page we have one of the medium of which the book tackles, the Dry Pastel, here we could see the different ways on how to use a pastel and the basic shading techniques one could do with the medium.

Tutorial with step by step process

On the left image again we could see the process on how the artist creates the drawing using the reference image found on the book as well. With this step by step process even an amateur artist will be able to grasp the the idea on how to do it making the depiction of the reference more accurate and less time consuming.




With this in mind I would say that I recommend this book without any doubts. it is a great book and it's size isn't so bad so one could bring it anywhere without much trouble. I still look for tutorials on the internet though because as I have said it is cheaper, but now with this book and a bunch of other books that I have, I'm using the internet less and less, plus the internet isn't really the best place to look for references since the sources would most definitely be either unknown or just inaccurate. Instead of learning a more less time consuming way an artist might just become entangled with the tutorials on the web linking from one page to another with the uncertainty that the sources are valid and comes from a reliable source, but remember this is just my opinion if one is more happy searching and learning from the web then keep going at it, because at the end of the day it will still be up to the artist if they are willing to learn beyond what they already know and keep on growing and improving...