Drawing Landscapes in Pencil

I like this timely guide to sketching. Thankyou for the quick arrival without additional struggle.

I watched a review of this book and knew I had to have it. I purchased it used, but would gladly have paid for a new one. The seller did mention that it had some damage to the cover, but the book itself was in good condition. The author, Ferdinand Petrie, gives basic techniques, then moves on to applying them to trees, mountains, rocks, buildings, and water. The last 50 pages are examples of his own work. This is a valuable addition to my collection of instructional art books.

BOOK: 5 StarsSELLER (hippo_books): 3 StarsThe book itself is wonderful. I have a pencil drawing book that included work by Petrie, and since I liked his work and method of teaching, I bought this book. He has an impressionistic style where you can see his pencil marks, which makes for beautiful texture. He shows you his initial planning and experimentation with composition, vignettes, and where to place light and shadow, then has step-by-step progression to the final drawing. I highly recommend this artist and book to improve or further explore your pencil landscape drawing techniques, as well as skills with planning your composition in general for any drawing.As for the seller, the book arrived in a reasonable amount of time, BUT it was wrapped in brown paper--that's it! No padding at all. One corner was completely ripped off and that corner of the book was pretty damaged. That was disappointing! They could have at least placed some shipping tape around the corners to reinforce them. I realize this book is used, but that's no reason to be that cheap with packaging. I will avoid this seller in the future.

While I appreciate all kinds of sketching, sketching outside with just pencils is my relax place.If you can relate, this book is excellent and inspiring. The sections on how to achieve different textures,value planning, and unique ways to compose scenes to tell a story were worth the price. Despite all the great info, the text info is concise. Again, I really appreciated that the book only focused on pencil works since most other urban or landscape books emphasize pen, watercolor etc, and pencil just becomes a preliminary step rather than its own final medium. Pencil is a beautiful, versatile, and inexpensive medium. You don't need a ton of pencils. In fact the author notes how many values could be obtained with a simple, 2 b pencil.

This is an excellent book on drawing. Just try to reproduce one of his drawings and you will quickly realize he is master. Drawing any one of his scenes is very instructive, what he puts in, what he leaves out, how he gets a great effect with only two or three pencil values. I've been drawing for years and was getting a little bored with my own style. I've tried to learn the "pencil painting" style that Petrie uses before but with little success, but now thanks to Petrie I finally got it. His style is a bit more impressionistic than realistic, he draws like you would expect a watercolor painter to draw, lots of white space, suggesting detail rather than explicitly putting in details. I wasn't surprised to find out that his other book is a watercolor painting book.Even though it deserves five stars, I have a few quibbles. I don't know if he had a lot softer pencils than I do, or the printing process darkened the values in his drawings, but I find I have to use at least two values darker pencil than he does, what he does with 2H and HB I have to do with HB and 2B to get anywhere near the same values. Also in the first part of the book he doesn't show any of the photo references of what he drew from,so you are basically reproducing his lines without seeing the original reference, which feels a little weird to me. Perhaps it is deliberate to help us students focus on what he is doing. Still, if you follow his drawing yours will look great. Later on in the book he does show the photo references and describe how he adjusted the scene in his drawing, which is very helpful. These are just small things, though, overall this is one of the best drawing books I have run across, and I've looked at a lot of them. Jack Hamm's book on landscape drawing is also very helpful in understanding the components of a landscape composition.

I'm just getting into this book, and it definitely is very useful for me, but the artist's work often looks a bit sloppy. I haven't sketched up many things -- I've only had the book a few days -- but sometimes I find myself fine-tuning the piece [i.e., using a paper stump to blend] and I wish he had included areas that show the reader material more broad than just the New England area.That said, I'd certainly recommend the book at a 3-star level -- I am finding it useful -- but sometimes I look at the author's "finished drawing" and it doesn't look finished to me at all.If you love New England beaches, lobster boats, and fishing shacks, you'll be really happy with this. I just wanted a broader focus than the book provides.

Picked this book up recently and have only begun to dig into it. I am relatively new to drawing and wanted to expand from portraits to landscapes. So far, it looks to cover many aspects of drawing from materials to techniques to value & composition choices. If you are looking for drawing help with portraits, still life, or gesture drawings, etc, this is NOT the book for you. The focus here is landscapes and the coverage is excellent. The step by step drawings cover a lot of ground between steps but the accompanying text is well written to explain what has happened in each step. Many samples have zoomed-in pictures to highlight techniques used to create the desired effect seen in the sample landscape. Overall, this is a great resource and I really like the artist's drawing style.

Jam packed with excellent, clear instruction and beautiful examples of pencil drawings as art.

Images in the Kindle edition are of really low quality. Can't even see the pencil strokes clearly..bad experience......don't buy the Kindle edition.

Purchased this book for my partner, she is very happy with it.

Book has excellent content, but the print quality which I received in India is poor. I have seen good quality print before and that's how I could identify the quality. It is hard to distinguish between various tones of pencil strokes in this book. With this high price, I thought I will get the original quality print. Totally disappointed.

Very nice book and well explained, very happy for the addition to my collection. Thank you.