annieb123's Review of 100 Birds, Butterflies, and Other Insects (Draw Like an Artist)

by Melissa Washburn

Featuring more than 600 sketches depicting a vast array of beautiful winged forms, Draw Like an Artist: 100 Birds, Butterflies, and Other Insects is a must-have visual reference for student and aspiring artists, fantasy and scientific illustrators, urban sketchers—anyone who’s 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 winged 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’s clear and elegant drawing stylewill make this a go-to sourcebook for years to come.

Learn how to:

Establish basic shapes and symmetry
Articulate lines for body shapes, wing forms, and shading
Add defining details

Draw Like an Artist: 100 Birds, Butterflies, and Other Insects is a library essential for any artist interested in learning how to draw the fascinating forms of birds and winged insects.

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.

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Draw Like an Artist: 100 Birds, Butterflies, and Other Insects is a tutorial and style guide in the Draw Like an Artist series - this volume is by Melissa Washburn. Released 3rd Nov 2020 by Quarto on their Quarry imprint, it's 112 pages and available in paperback and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

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: birds, butterflies, moths, bees & wasps, beetles, and other insects.

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 but the drawings are clear and have a high degree of detail.

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, animals, and a couple others). I would also recommend them for graphic design applications.

Four stars (given the limitations).

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

100 Birds, Butterflies, and Other Insects (Draw Like an Artist)

by Melissa Washburn

Reviewed by annieb123 on Nov 10, 2020

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