How to Draw: drawing and sketching objects and environments from your imagination Paperback – December 15, 2013

This is a fantastic reference for anyone who desires to learn the basics of sketching in perspective. Perspective drawing is the key focus on this book, but it also does a good job at showing how perspective in your drawing compares to scenes in reality.There are other books out there that teach things that are shown well in this book, but the thing that I think makes this one unique is that it brings so many different aspects of perspective, sketching, and object design together in one place. And while it doesn't include every technique available to a designer or artist, this explains a tremendous toolset that you'll be able to use (very quickly!) to produce most anything you can imagine. Isn't that the goal?The quality of the book is fantastic (I got the "paperback" version) with some of the thickest paper of any book I own. Each page is in full color (most publishers would have cut corners as many of the images only include spots of color and the temptation to make it greyscale had to be high).Also included is a link list to video lessons. There is an upcoming app that will allow you to scan images from many of the pages to trigger the videos, but it's not yet available on iOS or Google Play store (at least it didn't show up as linked from the QR code and separate searches). The link list works with your computer or a tablet. I'll update this review when the app becomes available.If you are unfamiliar with Scott Robertson, I highly recommend searching for him in YouTube. I've been following him for years and have 7 of his drawing, rendering, and designing DVDs from the Gnomon workshop. This book and the videos is a nice companion to those, but much less expensive! (Those DVDs were $30 each). Even with that background, I'm very happy with Scott's latest book.

This book is very much worth its weight in gold. For the reviewers who say this is not a beginner book, well, I started this book as a beginner. The only thing I knew about perspective was that items get smaller the further they are and that anything above the horizon line angles downward towards the vanishing point and anything under the horizon line angles upwards towards the vanishing point. Now I know how to multiply using perspective, work with planes, create grids and build objects with volume.I'm not saying that this is an easy read. This is a book that I needed to pick apart page by page. I worked every exercise and spent at least 2 hours each night studying it. If I found that I was struggling with an exercise for too long, I would move ahead to the next exercise and when done, I would go back to the previous exercise and try again.Yes, some of the example exercises could have been more helpful, such as providing us with the angles of the left and right vanishing points (because a lot of my working samples ended up very skewed). I found that by tracing the example from the book, I could then work the exercise easier. I then would practice it multiple times before I moved on. Tracing paper was a must have because I would first draft the base construction, then use tracing paper to finish it off. That way I could practice over and over without having to start from scratch. This helped the concepts to embed themselves in my brain. And yes, my brain hurt a lot when reviewing this book. :-)The key thing here is, practice, repeat and move on. If you are not a persone who has the patience to stick with something, then this book may not be for you.It took me 2 months to go through this book. But then again, I was obsessed with it and studied it thoroughly.I still am not able to draw a vehicle that looks road or air-worthy, but I have the baseline and now it will just take time and practice to continue to improve.The youtube videos were extremely helpful as well. Yes, it would have been nice to be able to cast the videos on the TV instead of being restricted to viewing them on my mobile device, but hey, we had videos which were a nice touch!This book has been one of the best art books that I have ever purchased.