annieb123's Review of Draw 500 Awesome Animals

Draw 500 Awesome Animals

Featuring 500 drawings of all sorts of creatures, big and small, this inspiring sketchbook is designed to offer artists, designers, and doodlers a fun and sophisticated collection of illustration fun.

Each spread in Draw 500 Awesome Animals features a curated selection of drawings of animals based on a theme (animal species, type, shape, marking pattern, or movement), each comprised of simple combinations of lines and shapes, with blank space for you to draw your versions. You’ll find hundreds of inspiring illustrated examples of a wide array of animals—cat, giraffe, seal, elephant, whale, and much, much more! This is not a step-by-step technique book, but rather a stylized guidebook where the animals are simplified, modernized, and reduced to the most basic elements to show you how simple abstract shapes and forms meld to create the building blocks of any item that you want to draw.

Each of the interpretations provides a different, interesting approach to drawing a single item, providing loads of inspiration for your own drawing. Presented in the author’s uniquely creative style, this engaging and motivational practice book provides a new take on the world of sketching, doodling, and designing.

Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Draw 500 Awesome Animals is a basic collection of line drawings of different animals by Julia Kuo. Released 2nd Nov 2021 by Quarto on their Chartwell imprint, it's 208 pages and is available in paperback format.

I love to draw and doodle. Despite not being super advanced and skillful yet, I find drawing very relaxing most of the time. This is an accessible guide full of very simple animal drawings. The animals are mostly stylized, they aren't overly realistic. There is no tutorial instruction; the pages are laid out very roughly thematically (but not labeled, there's no table of contents or index). Animals with similar shapes are often shown side by side for comparison purposes and inspiration: a pig from behind stands next to a similarly positioned skunk, pigs and sheep with similar outlines are arranged together, etc.

The book includes the line drawings alone. There is no introduction or step-by-step tutorials. There isn't any text. Most of the drawings are greyscale monochrome but there are some (roughly 10%) which are rendered in colored pencil.

Great selection for a gift for a young artist, perhaps with some added sketch pads and pencils. This would also make a good classroom or library book.I would also recommend this book to babysitters, grandparents, parents, and basically anyone who spends a fair bit of time with small kids in order to up their 'draw with me' game. I will use these to decorate journals and notes for friends.

Four stars.

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

Draw 500 Awesome Animals

Reviewed by annieb123 on Nov 10, 2021

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