Chartwell The Sketching & Drawing Bible Book

"The Sketching And Drawing Bible" by Marylin Scott is a broad and shallow survey of artist's materials and techniques related to drawing. The information on techniques focuses on how to achieve various textures, strokes etc. This is "low level" technique. You won't learn anything about how to draw a nose or a tree. The book is a spiral bound volume, about 6 by 8 inches and 3/4 of an inch thick (counting the hard covers) with glossy pages and many clear and colorful photographs. Much of the text is boilerplate truisms, the kind you would find in free pamphlets advertising art supplies.The book treats the following categories of drawing implements: pencils, graphite sticks, charcoal, conte, pens (of many types), colored pencils, pastels and oil pastels. Associated materials like erasers, paper and inks are also covered.The information on artist's materials is generic. Although some brand names are shown in the photos, there are no specific recommendations about brands or their special properties. For example, the entry for "pastels" explains that pastels are made of a pigment held together with a binder and that "oil pastels" are a different type of thing. There are hard pastels and soft pastels. They are sold as sticks or pencils, individually or in sets. There are some clear photos of a few pastel pencils and sets of round and square pastel sticks. If you knew nothing about pastels, this information would be useful, but that's about the extent of what you learn.There are many pages in the book on "techniques". These deal with the subjects like achieving various textures and types of strokes. ("Sgraffito" methods must fascinate the author, since a great variety of these are mentioned.) There is only scanty information about the topics in traditional drawing courses, such as figure drawing, portrait drawing and landscape drawing.If you just like to have books sitting around the house, the current price ( about $4 for a used copy) isn't bad and this book wouldn't take up much space. Artists might enjoy browsing the techniques when they aren't in the mood for any heavy reading. To put the word "Bible" in the title of this book is rather presumptuous. One associates that word with a book that is authoritative, specific and exhaustive. This book is shallow, general and incomplete. (If religious writers followed the style of this book there would be no need for schisms and sects.)I rate this book as two out of five stars to indicate that it is a below average manual of artist's supplies and low level techniques. I penalize it for being too shallow on the subjects that it does cover. I don't penalize it for having a misleading title. That is such a common fault with non-fiction books that it is almost a tradition.

The organization and presentation of instruction was truly an aid in trying new media and combining them to render a drawing. Explanations were clear.

I was looking for a reference book that gave clear, detailed information on materials and techniques specific to drawing (rather than painting) and this book does an excellent job of that. It's well set out with clear, concise information and heaps of relevant illustrations. While there are many books on art materials and techniques, very few are specific to drawing. This book covers a wide range of drawing materials and techniques and it was a pleasure to read the book from cover to cover as all the information was specific to my interests. While there is a huge amount of excellent information for the beginner, I'm sure experienced sketchers & drawers will also find lots of useful information and ideas.

Great little reference book but could have included a little more.

The Artist's Bibles books are all worthwhile resources.They'll each give you great techniques and references for each medium.Obviously, this one provided some good fundamental tidbits about sketching - and personally, I feel that sketching is a key piece to all visual art.

This book has many great ideas and the fundementals of drawing. Many wonderful illustrations. whether are a beginner or more adv anced you will find something in this book.

This is an interesting book. It cover a lot of methods but doesn't go into great detail about them. It's just provides an overview - which is all I need sometimes to decide if I want to learn more about the method.

I am an art major in college and this book is a great reference for my intro classes.

good

Sketching and Drawing Bible (Artists Bibles)Interesting book well made.I would recommend this book to anyone.There is nothing that i disliked.