100 Realistic Animals by Melissa Washburn

100 Realistic Animals (Draw Like an Artist)

by Melissa Washburn

Featuring 600+ sketches depicting a vast array of beautiful animal forms, detailed faces, and more, Draw Like an Artist: 100 Realistic Animals is a must-have visual reference book for student artists, scientific illustrators, urban sketchers, and anyone seeking to improve their realistic drawing skills.

This contemporary, step-by-step guidebook demonstrates fundamental art concepts like proportion, anatomy, and spatial relationships as you learn to draw a full range of creatures, all shown from a variety of perspectives. Each set of illustrations takes you from beginning sketch lines to a finished drawing.

Author Melissa Washburn is a skilled illustrator whose clear and elegant drawing style will make this a go-to sourcebook for years to come.

Draw Like an Artist: 100 Realistic Animals is the third book in the Draw Like an Artist series following Faces and Figures and Flowers and Plants.

The books in the Draw Like an Artist series are richly visual references for learning how to draw classic subjects realistically through hundreds of step-by-step images created by expert artists and illustrators.

Reviewed by annieb123 on

4 of 5 stars

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Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Draw Like an Artist: 100 Realistic Animals is a step-by-step tutorial guide for artists in the Draw Like An Artist series. Due out 17th Dec 2019 from Quarto on their Quarry imprint, it's 112 pages and will be available in paperback format.

These books all follow the same format. A very short introduction (10% of the content) gives some basic tips and very (very) brief overview of recommended materials. The following chapters contain short step-by step progress illustrations for line drawing 100 animals by category: household animals, domestic animals, wild animals, birds, reptiles/amphibians/cephalopod (octopus), and a final chapter with specific studies which incorporate perspective and specific parts such as fur.

These are very simple single page 5-8 step illustrations. The finished drawings are not part of a composition, and there is no written direction involved. All of them are simple enough to not really require directions. None of them are beyond the ability of keen amateur level. Correspondingly, there is little here which will challenge advanced artists.

This would make a superlative choice for young artists or adult learners, especially bundled with drawing supplies. There are several other companion volumes available also (flowers, faces, and some others probably).

Four stars (given the limitations).

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

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