Learn to draw and paint more than 100 of your favorite everyday items!
Step-by-step projects, prompts, and creative inspiration make it fun and easy to draw your outfit, your favorite foods, your garden, and much more using drawing and painting tools you already have on hand.
From learning to draw and paint plants, flowers, and bicycles to the neighborhood café and the contents of the kitchen cabinet, Draw Every Little Thing demonstrates just how easy it is to render the world around you with little more than a pencil, paper, and paint.
Following a brief introduction to the joys of simplistic drawing and painting, this aesthetically pleasing book familiarizes you with a range of drawing tools and materials, including graphite pencil, pen and ink, colored pencil, and gouache, before offering a quick overview of basic color theory. Each subsequent chapter is then devoted to a specific theme—kitchenalia, hobbies, neighborhood haunts, and much more—and packed with simple step-by-step drawing projects.
This accessible book encourages you to jump around so you can draw what immediately inspires you. Interactive prompts, creative exercises, and inspiring ideas make the process fun and engaging. Easy techniques and helpful instructions show you how to develop your own personal style, as well as add color to your drawings using gouache and colored pencil. Crafty projects round out the book, allowing you to use your newfound drawing and painting skills.
Filled to the brim with whimsical artwork and loads of creative ideas, Draw Every Little Thing encourages artists of all skill levels to draw any time inspiration strikes.
The Inspired Artist series invites art hobbyists and casual art enthusiasts to have fun learning basic art concepts, relaxing into the creative process to make art in a playful, contemporary style.
Expand your creative exploration of the everyday with the fun follow-up book, Inspired Artist: Paint Every Little Thing (September 2021). Also from the series, find even more artistic inspiration with Block Print for Beginners (March 2021) and Watercolor Painting at Home (October 2021).
Inspired Artist: Draw Every Little Thing is a simple and appealing tutorial guide for painting and drawing by Flora Waycott. Released 1st Oct 2019 by Quarto on their Walter Foster imprint, it's 128 pages and available in ebook and paperback formats.
The author has a naive, whimsical, folk-art inspired aesthetic. The items are everyday familiar objects and can be used in so many ways.
The layout follows the familiar Walter Foster tutorial format. An introduction and artist's statement (5% of the total content) is followed by sub-chapters on finding inspiration, tools and materials, a short and easily accessible general drawing tutorial and an introduction to color theory. The following four chapters are full of step by step specific drawing tutorials for objects around the house, outdoors, everyday items, and around town. The tutorial chapters are also interspersed with practice pages and drawing prompts for the reader to try out their own drawn items. The final chapter includes specific gallery tutorials for a charming handmade concertina book, a card, and a bookmark. These are all achievable by artists with all levels of ability.
It's unclear from the publishing info available online, but the eARC I received has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references. I hope the ebook release version does also. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately. Presumably that feature will carry through to the final release version.
This book would be useful for readers who wish to incorporate more direct drawing and painting to coordinate with journaling or other diary/writing activities, cardmakers and other papercrafters, as well as people who just want to add a little more painting in their day-to-day lives.
Five stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
