One Drawing A Day: A 6-Week Course Exploring Creativity with Illustration and Mixed Media [Paperback]

This is an exciting and inspirational book - for people with a significant amount of drawing experience, and/or a great deal of creative daring. If you have already done gestural drawing, it should help a lot as this is largely the book's style. Even then, you might like to approach the book inventively by not rigidly following the lesson sequence and by spending more time on each lesson - for example, doing more than one drawing for each exercise using different viewpoints, even different mediums. Six weeks does seem rather accelerated, even if you have all the time in the world to create art. I for one am taking a more leisurely pace, spending several weeks on lesson one, which is to draw a still life of found objects from around the house. I am even sketching single items as exploratory exercises.

For a complete newcomer to drawing, the book's pace and minimal instructions could be rather daunting. For example, by the eighth day, you are expected to start drawing portraits of family members, a diplomatic exercise in itself. Could it include the family cat or dog? Human faces, of course, require considerable skill to draw, and the examples given obviously come from a highly experienced artist. The author could have let the beginner in more gently here - perhaps, like Da Vinci, to begin by drawing a series of noses, or ears or eyes? A successful artist in my country sketches men in slouch hats that cover the face, and riding on horses, only the equine rear end and tail! Artistic liscence if you like the idea.

I found it helpful to flip over to the gallery at the back of the book where selected artists (who belong to Studio 4182 as does Lawlor) use considerable latitude in interpreting their subject matter - from realistic to abstract to flamboyant. Ah, so I could approach a portrait in an abstract way? It would have helped to be given this option earlier in the book. The Studio 1482 website shows even more options.

The author, Veronica Lawlor is a reportage artist - an occupation that developed out of the more formal photographic reportage, which focused largely on social issues. Reportage artists take an informal and even light-hearted approach to their subject matter, something that could be delightfully infective for those of us who have taken a more prosaic approach to drawing. I expect to have a livelier and more fluid style at the end of six weeks. (Okay, so it will probably take me six months.)

A delightful book - but one that requires a creative leap.

This is a book that grew out of the One Drawing a Day blog.

There are 42 interesting daily exercises aimed at giving you ideas on what to draw, and encourages encourage exploration and experimentation. Some involves drawing simple subjects around the house, some encourages you to draw outdoors, drawing the nature or people at a cafe.

The instructions are minimal but give you a good starting point to generate more ideas on things you can draw. The exercises require you to find a subject to draw, something you can see and use a reference, and not on conjuring ideas from imagination. The drawing style you can use are suggested by the exercises. We're not talking about realistic representational drawings but more on the loose and expressive.

It's important to note that this is a mixed media book. There are lessons that require different materials, like charcoal, watercolour, crayon, bamboo pen, etc. If you don't already have them, it might be difficult to follow along. A lesson that requires using watercolour can't really be substituted with other materials without losing the point of the lesson.

This is not a book for beginners with absolutely no idea on how to draw. You can be asked to draw portraits, and that requires observation skills that are taught not in the book. However, it's a fine book to pair with beginner drawing books.

The ending gallery features the work of artists from Studio 1482, which author Veronica Lawlor is part of. Other artists includes Despina Georgiadis, Eddie Peña, Dominick Santise, Kati Nawrocki, Greg Betza, Michele Bedigian and Margaret Hurst.

I'll recommend this book to those who want to keep their mind creative, and those who just want to have fun drawing.

(There are more pictures of the book on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)

If you REALLY want to learn to draw get this book. It is no nonsense and straight to the point. The point being if you want to learn to draw...........DRAW!! Do a drawing every day, experiment, let the mistakes happen and have fun! The drawing in this book are so inspirational as are the artists that are featured. A must have for anyone wanting to learn to draw.