How to Draw: drawing and sketching objects and environments from your imagination

This book is amazing in a lot of ways. The building blocks of technical drawings or for drawing anything are in these pages. The artist also includes hours of video content.

This book is comprehensive and dense. It really gets into the how and the why of perspective. It's what I wish all art books could be.

Normally I pic sections from books or training videos that I am interested in learning. Just thumbed through this book and every chapter has been set up in a way that to skip over anything would be a crime. This will be one book that is read cover to cover.

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.

Top notch clear explanations of perspective concepts and practical techniques

It took me a while, but I finally got through this textbook. Overall, I feel that this book is relatively well-rounded and does what it promises: Teaches you the basics as well as the advanced techniques used to draw objects and environments accurately. What this book does NOT do is teach anatomy, so if that is your goal, turn away, you're looking at the wrong book.Essentially, this book teaches how professionals do precise measurements in order to draw things in 3D space, and what techniques they use to fill in the empty spaces that most beginners would be unable to draw. It teaches things like perspective, mirroring or copying, and proportions between objects.Unfortunately, even though the lessons aren't too difficult to follow through, there is a huge lack of practical learning. The book doesn't give you any practice lessons to try to solve. It's just designed as a reference book for you to go back to whenever you're actually drawing and need to use a technique to draw something specific. This makes it really hard to learn the concepts in the books, since you'll often not need to or won't want to go out of your way just to use them.I draw fantastical environments, and I actually found it time-consuming to adhere to the techniques used in the book. Sure, they are the "right way" of drawing things in 3D space, but unless you're creating art for professional purposes, a lot of the techniques are unnecessary and can be substituted by perspective, eyeballing, and feel.The book promises that it will teach you how to draw anything you can imagine, but the part of the book that teaches about visual libraries (developing unique ideas) was seriously lacking. I was disappointed by this. It doesn't really teach anything that others out there haven't described already. It's still the adage of "look up all sorts of keywords and take idea from each one." I suppose this is the general truth, but Feng Zhu teaches about it much better in his free video lessons.Overall, I recommend this book only if you need to learn the industry techniques used for more advanced applications such as architectural drawing or professional concept art. If you are a casual artist, don't bother; just get any ordinary perspective book (or even just learn about that online) and eyeball the rest that you can't figure out. Also, don't bother buying the sequel book (How to Render) unless you actually need it. It's completely different and delves more into the field of concept art.

I put off buying this book because of reviews that said it's too advanced and/or doesn't explain certain sections properly.I bought this book anyway and I couldn't of been happier. I am breezing through this book and learning great techniques. I'm not finished with it, but I've started studying from this book and have done a flip through of every chapter. All of it is in my skill level. I have basic knowledge of 1, 2, 3 and 4 pt perspective. If I look at a cube, I can tell you what perspective it is in, an approximation of where the vanishing points are, and if the cube is higher/lower than the horizon line. I can freehand cubes and rectangular planes well. If I didn't have that prior basic knowledge down, yeah this book would give me a headache. But there's lots of great YouTube tutorials that will teach you those basics so you can then move on to this book. Highly recommend, I can't believe I put off buying this book for so long. Such great knowledge in here. 10/10 for me.