annieb123's Review of 20 Ways to Draw Everything

20 Ways to Draw Everything

Explore almost every way imaginable to draw dolphins, trains, flowers, food, and more with 20 Ways to Draw Everything.

Designed to offer artists, designers, and doodlers fun illustration inspiration, each spread of this portable sketchbook features 20 art examples—simplified, modernized, and reduced to the most basic elements—showing you how simple abstract shapes and forms create the building blocks of any item that you want to draw. Each of the 20 interpretations provides a different, interesting approach to drawing a single item, providing loads of inspiration for your own drawing.

Either on the opposite page or right alongside the example drawings, you'll be prompted to draw 20 of each thing, from trees and flowers to wild shapes and sea creatures and everything in between. This is not a step-by-step technique book, but rather an opportunity for you to draw your own versions of these amazing doodles side-by-side the inspiration pieces.

Organized into the sections of “Get Up and Go,” “Under the Sea,” and “Oodles of Doodles,” enjoy hours of creative fun drawing your versions of iconic subjects, such as:

Zigzags, hearts, spirals, and teardrops
Crabs, mermaids, sharks, and walruses
Bikes, trains, planes, and hot air balloons
And so much more

Featuring illustrations by Trina Dalziel, James Gulliver Hancock, and Rachael Taylor, this amazing compilation of over 100 design themes and prompts, get ready to learn how to draw truly everything!

Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

20 Ways to Draw Everything is a resource and pattern book curated from previously published material by the creative team at Chartwell. Released 6th July 2021 by Quarto on their Chartwell imprint, it's 224 pages and is available in paperback format.

This is emphatically *not* a step-by-step tutorial guide. Rather, it's a listing of 100 objects grouped thematically with numerous interpretations of each. There are some antique cars, bicycles, anchors, random doodles, and so on. They range from very simple and stylistic (stick figures) to quite elaborate and pattern rich "Zentangle" type filled shapes. There are blank spaces on each page to allow the reader to fill in or reproduce the drawings.

The pages can be used as drawing prompts. Quite a number of them would make wonderful limbering and warming up exercises for art students to get lines and marks onto their surfaces. Journalers and doodlers will find a lot of inspiration here. Many of the line drawings would be nice for other crafts such as lino printing, surface embroidery, leatherwork, whittling, contemporary calligraphy/illumination, and possibly weaving or knitting.

This would be a good selection for the artist's studio for reference, maker's groups, guilds and group studios or libraries.

Four stars.

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

20 Ways to Draw Everything

Reviewed by annieb123 on Jul 13, 2021

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