An inspirational, instructional, and visually stimulating guide to sketching and drawing. Dare to Sketch is filled with practical tips about which materials to use, a variety of subject matter ranging from easy to more challenging, and wisdom about overcoming creative blocks and fear of making mistakes. A whimsical beginner's guide to sketching, covering all of the important basics: what kind of notebook to buy, what drawing materials to use, ideas for subject matter, and daily exercises. Includes inviting, inspirational, and idiosyncratic tips (don't start on the first page of your sketchbook!), Dare to Sketch is gorgeously illustrated with the author's unique and contemporary art style.

Develop your drawing skills and rediscover the world around you with this innovative and beautifully illustrated book. In Sketch Book for the Artist, acclaimed artist and teacher Sarah Simblet teaches you how to draw by combining practical lessons with examples of both her own work and some of the world's greatest drawings. She introduces all the key drawing materials, then shows you how to master the basic elements of drawing in a series of step-by-step drawing classes, covering topics ranging from simple mark-making to establishing form, creating tone, and conveying perspective. You will learn how to explore a wide variety of subjects, from still life, plants, and animals to portraits, the human body, landscapes, and buildings, all of which are introduced with outstanding drawings by famous artists. The bestselling author of Anatomy for the Artist and Botany for the Artist, Sarah demonstrates how she works - from quick pencil sketches to pen and ink studies - with expertise and plenty of encouraging tips, and complements them with plentiful examples from her own drawing books. Sketch Book for the Artist is for anyone who wants to draw, whether you are a complete beginner or would like to refresh your existing skills. Whatever your ability, it will inspire you to reach for a pencil and paper and start drawing.

Urban sketcher Mike Daikubara gives beginners a crash course in location sketching that you can use in any city or town in Sketch Now, Think Later.

Meet this very actionable and fun book that, if you would work with, will definitely change your interior design project presentation and, possibly, even your whole creative life. This book is written particularly for interior designers and interior design students who are new to freehand sketching and want to master an amazing skill for better performance on the interior design scene.Here you will find a lot of tools, tips and tricks for freehand sketching. Richly illustrated this book can serve as a source of great inspiration, and for some of you it is going to become a desk book.

The Sketch Encyclopedia is a fascinating art resource showing you how to draw over 1000 people, places, creatures, and objects.

“A meditation on the creative process . . . a reminder that even the brightest creative minds face challenges when making consistently great work.” —Wired From award-winning artist and author Christoph Niemann comes a collection of witty illustrations and whimsical views on working creatively. Taking its cue from his New York Times column Abstract Sunday, this book covers Niemann’s entire career and showcases brilliant observations of contemporary life through sketches, travel journals, and popular newspaper features. The narrative guides readers through Christoph’s creative process, how he built his career, and how he overcomes the internal and external obstacles that creative people face—all presented with disarming wit and intellect. Enhanced with nearly 350 original images, this book is a tremendous inspirational and aspirational resource. “A frank and inspirational look at the trials and tribulations of a life spent producing artworks that have been seen the world over.” —It’s Nice That

Drawing activities, art instruction, and advice for artists and non-artists alike. Urban sketching--the process of drawing on the go as a regular practice--is a hot trend in the drawing world. It's also a practical necessity for creatively minded people in a busy world. In this aspirational guide, self-taught French artist France Belleville-Van Stone emboldens readers to craft a ritual of their own and devote more time to art, even if it's just 10 minutes a day. She offers motivation to move beyond the comfort zone, as well as instruction on turning rough sketches into finished work. Belleville Van-Stone learned how to draw through her own daily practice and knows first-hand how hard it is to find time to incorporate creativity into a busy life. She encourages and teaches us how to do it with advice and guidance such as: · An A-to-Z list of daily sketch prompts, from airports to bananas, faces to hands, meetings and workplaces · Tips on what drawing supplies you can and should have--and how to carry them around · Sections on accepting mistakes, drawing with limited resources, and redefining completion · Plusses and minuses of going digital, including apps, styluses, and brushes For those of us who dream of drawing in the minutes between school and work, bathtime and bedtime, and waking and walking out the door, the practical advice in Sketch! is a revelation. By sharing her own creative process, Belleville-Van Stone Sketch inspires artists both established and aspiring to rethink their daily practice, sketch for the pure joy of it, and document their lives and the world around them.

Accounts of the rise of American literature often start in the 1850s with a cluster of "great American novels"—Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But these great works did not spring fully formed from the heads of their creators. All three relied on conventions of short fiction built up during the "culture of beginnings," the three decades following the War of 1812 when public figures glorified the American past and called for a patriotic national literature. Decentering the novel as the favored form of early nineteenth-century national literature, Lydia Fash repositions the sketch and the tale at the center of accounts of American literary history, revealing how cultural forces shaped short fiction that was subsequently mined for these celebrated midcentury novels and for the first novel published by an African American. In the shorter works of writers such as Washington Irving, Catharine Sedgwick, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lydia Maria Child, among others, the aesthetic of brevity enabled the beginning idea of a story to take the outsized importance fitted to the culture of beginnings. Fash argues that these short forms, with their ethnic exclusions and narrative innovations, coached readers on how to think about the United States’ past and the nature of narrative time itself. Combining history, print history, and literary criticism, this book treats short fiction as a vital site for debate over what it meant to be American, thereby offering a new account of the birth of a self-consciously national literary tradition.