With Drawing: Birds, learn to render a variety of beautiful, realistic birds in graphite pencil.
Artists of all skill levels and bird enthusiasts alike will find creative inspiration and valuable drawing instruction in Drawing: Birds. This comprehensive, 10.25 × 13.75–inch book book opens with an introduction to essential drawing tools, including graphite pencils, erasers, paper, and other materials. Then learn a variety of basic drawing techniques, such as shading, stippling, hatching, crosshatching, and others. Discover helpful tips for creating a good composition, understanding and seeing value, transferring photo references, and taking artistic liberties. After learning the drawing basics, jump into the easy step-by-step projects to draw specific birds, including a barred owl, a great blue heron, a ruby-throated hummingbird, a gray parrot, a pileated woodpecker, and black-capped chickadees.
In this book, professional artist and nature enthusiast Maury Aaseng offers simple, comprehensive instruction for drawing a range of lovely birds, as well as information for achieving accurate proportions, capturing motion, and building up form. Aaseng also shows you how to create realistic textures, such as feathers, nests, tree bark, and water. With his easy step-by-step projects that start with basic shapes and progress to detailed final drawings, you can draw many birds, from the common to the exotic. Easy-to-follow instruction and art tips throughout make Drawing: Birds a complete guide for creating realistic and detailed drawings of these feathered friends. For the aspiring avian artist, this book is a must-have art-instruction reference.
Designed for beginners, the How to Draw & Paint series offers easy-to-follow guides that introduce artists to basic tools and materials and include simple step-by-step lessons for a variety of projects suitable for the aspiring artist. Drawing: Birds allows artists to develop drawing skills by demonstrating how to start with basic shapes and use pencil and shading techniques to create varied textures, values, and details for a realistic, completed drawing.
Drawing: Birds is a new book in the Learn to Draw Step by Step series. Released 7th May 2019 by Quarto on their Walter Foster imprint, it's 40 pages and available in paperback and ebook formats.
The titles in this series are all formatted in a similar manner and this one is no exception.
A short general introduction (10%) covers tools and materials including pencils, paper, blending tools, etc. The intro is followed by a group of non-specific tutorials on graphite techniques, shading, light, shapes and perspective. The following tutorial chapters are specific for different bird subjects and include specific anatomy: eyes, claws, beaks, etc, leading to some full body specific studies (hummingbird, owl, heron, woodpecker, chickadee).
I like these tutorial booklets, they're inexpensive and full of useful info for artists looking for improvement in their own work.
Four stars - for what it covers and for a very short tutorial guide, it does the job admirably well.
Disclosure: I received an early eARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
