You can download Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner by Claire Watson Garcia free in pdf format.
Watson-Guptill | October 2003 | ISBN-10: 0823013952 | PDF | 160 pages | 39.3 mb
About Book
Based upon the author’s own successful workshops, Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner helps new artists create competent, often eloquent drawings. A series of progressive lessons demonstrates such essential skills as recording edges, creating dimension, adding accuracy, developing value, balancing compositional elements, and drawing the human face, both frontal and profile views. Step by step, readers learn how to create a reasonable likeness of an object and give it spatial depth using such simple black-and-white mediums as pens, pencils, charcoal, and graphite wash. Inspirational examples and tips for success from beginning students who have worked on the same material confirm readers’ successes, and allow readers to consider the advice and impressions of others at the same level.
As you add values to your sketches, they will gain a sense of dimension and weight. They may look less like fleeting impressions and more like solid objects, especially at a distance. The more time you spend adding visual information to your drawing, the closer you get to creating a study. The name itself implies that the artist has spent time closely observing the object. This scrutiny may result in more substantial, solid-looking drawings, with more detail and refined technique. The major differences between sketch and study are that in creating a study, more time is spent at a slower pace, adding a greater amount of detail, with more refined value application
ake Your Time
Many beginners wonder if they’re taking too long. It’s not how long you take; it’s how long the drawing takes. Just stay with it until it feels and looks finished– to you.
If your sketches are developing into studies, or you’d like them to, add the following points to your drawing approach. For creating a study:
-Slow your pace.
-Break up contour lines into smaller overlapping lines.
-Keep your pencil in closer contact with the paper surface.
-Fill in values with greater precision.
-Add more detail.
-Evaluate each area more frequently.
About the Author
Claire Garcia is an artist, writer, and teacher. She is an instructor at New England’s renowned Silvermine School of Art, in New Canaan, CT, where her workshops and courses “for the Absolute and Utter Beginner” have been popular for over twenty years. She also teaches at Brookfield Craft Center in Brookfield, CT,one of the preeminent craft schools in the Northeast, where she gives drawing classes adapted to the needs of craft artists.
Garcia combines her passion for creating, teaching, and writing about art in her books “Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner”-which Library Journal called “…simply the best beginners’ drawing book available,” and its companion, the recently published “Painting for the Absolute and Utter Beginner.”
An accomplished and recognized artist, Garcia’s work has been exhibited in numerous national juried exhibitions. Throughout her career, Garcia has combined her writing and artistic skills. As a founding member of Kids Can Press, a groundbreaking children’s book publishing house in Toronto, she wrote and/ or illustrated three well received children’s books.