30-Minute Drawing for Beginners: Easy Step-by-Step Lessons and Techniques for Landscapes, Still Lifes, Figures, and More

Its a good way for beginners to understand the basics of art, has a few how to draws in it,

This is a very good, basic "how to" book suitable for any age. It has good illustrations and easy to understand and follow instructions for a wide variety of drawing exercises. Would make a very nice gift.

Definitely for the “beginner-beginners”. Nice quality. The paper is thick, the writing is large. The cover is smooth and sturdy. The topics are thorough, but the detail is limited. There are two full pages detailing seven chapters, with multiple exercises in each chapter. Each exercise consists of two pages, the first page explains the exercise and gives you directions to follow. The second page gives you a sketch of the exercise. It would be nice to have space to complete the exercise in the book. Overall, this is nicely done. It is a very good option for someone brand new to drawing or sketching, just as the name of the book implies. It would also be a great gift for that person or anyone you would encourage to start a new hobby. If you’ve personally had any drawing experience or ever taken an introductory art/drawing course, this book “may possibly be” a bit too remedial for you. The book is authored by an artist and teacher who is obviously dedicated to his craft. This book is proof of this. I recommend it.

Learning lots and sharpening skills.

Was what I expected. Very informative.

If I could rate this like 3 1/2 stars I would because it’s not a bad book by any means, but as an artist by trade myself, I feel like it’s not as beginner friendly as it advertises, also after flipping through the book, I noticed that some of the examples and instructions are either counterintuitive or just bad. I did not buy this for myself, I bought it for my mother who wants to learn how to draw. She’s already artistically talented, but drawing is not her strong suit and I felt that giving her a book with exercises would help with her visualization skills and help her learn things like shading which she struggles with. My mother mainly struggles with muscle control and overall confidence when drawing because she hasn’t taken an art class in 30 or so years. I was looking for something that would help with fundamentals and basic techniques, so when she opened up the book to start the first exercise and she was confused because it was basically just “look at an object and draw it”, I was sort of annoyed. I had flipped through the book when it came in and I saw several good looking lessons (I hadn’t started looking through the beginning first, my mistake) and a couple that I thought were generally bad, but there’s a lot of lessons in the book and I felt that a couple bad ones can be easily corrected (I specialize in portraits and the face drawing exercise, the example in particular, was very poorly done in my opinion), so I still felt like the book was okay. I then took a closer look at the exercises in the beginning of the book with my mom and realized that the first 4 or 5 lessons are just “find a thing and draw it” exercises. There’s no instruction or tips on techniques, it’s just a lot of still life drawing which, if you ask me, is sort of starting right in the middle of learning how to draw. I thought there would’ve been a couple lessons on using shapes or composition and learning how to recreate an example image, not a whole page that just says “draw a shoe”. My mom was so upset! She was immediately overwhelmed and her excitement was almost completely gone after the first lesson because it was just too intimidating to just find a 3D object and sketch it all on her own! I would’ve imagined there would’ve been some 2D how-to’s before jumping into just drawing a 3D object by sight. Ultimately, with encouragement, she tried a couple of exercises from the book, but she just felt like she had no direction or anyway to know if she was doing well or not (I felt she was, at least with so little to work with), so she just sort of gave up after that. So I personally designed some drawing exercises on my tablet and printed them for her to help her with muscle memory and visualization. She did great with this and has since taken it upon herself to draw images like the ones from her coloring books and she has way more confidence now. I’ve told her to maybe skip ahead in the book to find something that might be interesting to her, but she feel the books instructions are not clear enough and she gets very overwhelmed, so I think I’m gonna stick to finding YouTube videos for her and drawing my own exercises for her to practice with. I’m just glad that the book wasn’t expensive, but for the price I could’ve bought her a new coloring book which she would’ve liked better.

I got this drawing book because I was tired of floundering around with my beginning drawing skills. What I expected was convoluted instructions that would frustrate me and cause me to throw the book across the room. But what I got was completely different! The author created a phenomenal book that is so easy to follow. In just a few pages it revolutionized my sketching skills. I am so impressed with how easy the instructions were straight and to the point. If the author is reading this review - I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I was choked up with emotion when I saw that with the help of your book, I really can sketch! Obviously, I highly recommend this book!

Bought this cause I’ve always wanted to learn to draw as a hobby. So far I love it.

Exactly what I needed. Great

the book is good content wise. demos given are useful BUT the printing was faded and unreadable . I returned it .

Pretty decent book, helping beginners go step by step showing them how to mechanically and logically approach drawing different items.

I like the premise of the book, the sample certainly makes it look ideal for a beginner like me, who is keen to learn some basics and start drawing. but one of the first exercises, where I had a go at drawing a still life arrangement of three random items- it was a 15 minute exercise. I followed the steps- well I tried to, but the steps were giving no detailed tips I could use other than set a timer, try to get the shapes and proportions right.. but I am looking and comparing my sketch to the example and the written steps and no where does it set out, how to shade the things I am drawing, yet the illustration by the third and final step, well that was perfect. mine was....not. I looked for some advice but none to be found. I don't find that particularly helpful or inspiring at such an early point of a Drawing for Beginners book.

This is a great book to learn different techniques to draw. My granddaughter is teaching herself to draw and this book will help her a lot, it's a thick book with plenty of pictures that gives you step by step instructions. I recommend it and I bought more.