Pencil Sketching, 2nd Edition

Although not so obvi­ous from the title, Pen­cil Sketch­ing is really about sketch­ing land­scapes and archi­tec­ture. It's a pretty great book with so many great sketches that it makes you want to get out there and draw noth­ing but buildings! In this book, Wang gives a solid overview of pen­cil use, the strokes pro­duced by var­i­ous kinds of pen­cils and dif­fer­ent grips and hand/arm move­ments for sketch­ing. What I really liked was the sam­ples and exer­cises of strokes that are use­ful for sketch­ing land­scapes and build­ings. Some might find this overly sim­plis­tic, but as a begin­ner, I thought it was useful! In gen­eral, the book has quite lit­tle text but lots of sketches. Most of the impor­tant lessons in the book are explained through sketches; for exam­ples, how to shade to cre­ate con­trast and give the impres­sion of depth. In fact, the whole last chap­ter (all 20 pages of it) only has exam­ples of Wang's sketches. How­ever, even with­out text, the book has a lot of use­ful lessons. If you hate read­ing, this is def­i­nitely a good book for you! I, on the other hand, LOVE read­ing so I wish this book had more pages for me to read. Read my full review with pictures on my website: [...]