This easy-to-follow guide by a noted artist and teacher offers a wealth of valuable tips and suggestions for recording the beauty of nature on drawing paper. Stressing the value of on-the-spot drawings, Wendon Blake's clearly written manual provides time-tested advice on training your powers of observation; judging proportions of typical landscape forms such as boulders, trees, and clouds; learning how to judge light and dark areas of a subject to convert colors to black-and-white tones; and much more.
You'll also find a host of valuable pointers on how best to use pencil, chalk, charcoal, and tools; how to establish linear and aerial perspectives; and how to transform cubical, cylindrical, rounded, and irregular shapes into such natural forms as mountains, forests, sand dunes, trees, meadows, rocky shorelines, and other geographical features.
A special feature of this book is a series of ten step-by-step demonstrations of complete landscape and coastal subjects. You'll learn to put all the techniques you've acquired to work in drawing the rich texture and details of trees, the intricate forms of a meadow with the broad shapes of hills in the distance, a stream winding among rocks and trees, the rugged forms of mountains, a shadowy pine forest, and more. These demonstrations are organized according to medium in three groupings--pencil, chalk, and charcoal--and present a wide range of drawing techniques to show you the many ways of rendering contour, light and shade, texture, and detail in these versatile drawing media.
An indispensable guide for novices, "Landscape Drawing Step by Step" will also serve as a highly useful review of fundamentals for teachers and experienced artists.
Dover (1998) republication of "Landscape Drawing, " originally published by Watson-Guptill Publications, New York, 1981.
