★★★★★ | Learn to draw human body

🎨 from quick to detailed drawings
🎨 various poses
🎨 anatomy
🎨 strategies for building your skills

Life Drawing for Artists teaches a contemporary approach to figure drawing that includes both the familiar poses—standing, sitting, lying down—but also how to capture figures in movement and in more dynamic and engaging positions.

Author Chris Legaspi is a dedicated, life-long artist and admired instructor who is known for his dynamic figurative drawings and paintings, and as a successful illustrator in the entertainment industry. Whether you are an aspiring illustrator, art student, or a professional artist looking to develop your abilities, Life Drawing for Artists shows how to build your skills by combining fundamental building blocks, such as gesture lines, shape and design, structure, value control, and edge or line control.

You’ll focus on different skills while working on both quick timed drawings and longer detailed drawings. The book covers important topics, such as drawing different views, understanding perspective, foreshortening strategies, and how to deal with various lighting conditions. The examples and tutorials explore virtually every pose scenario, as well as many active and dynamic movements.

Breathe drama into your figures as you master the fundamentals with this fresh approach to life drawing.

The For Artists series expertly guides and instructs artists at all skill levels who want to develop their classical drawing and painting skills and create realistic and representational art.

Anyway, I have to start with this: before this book I had a misconception of what life drawing is. I thought ‘life? as opposed to dead? like dead nature?’ Needless to say: I was dumb.

To everyone as inexperienced with artists’ lingo as me — life drawing is drawing people in real life.

Now, coming back to the book itself — it was a HUGE help for a self-taught artist like me.

• I get to learn the basics of shape and form
• I significantly improved my drawing technique
• I improved my knowledge of human physique
• I learned to shade things better
• I learned to build dynamic poses no matter if it was a quick pose or a detailed one

I’m probably not even listing all the ways in which my art improved. I went through the whole book one thing at a time and it felt like an actual course, which I appreciate.

The only complaint I have — I noticed that while the female models were fully in nude, male models kept their underwear on? I’m curious as to why.

Below check some of the practices I did along with the book:

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★★★★☆ | Easy art projects for watercolour beginners

🎨 basics of watercolours
🎨 step-by-step guides
🎨 wide variety of projects
🎨 easy to follow

With Watercolor the Easy Way, your watercoloring creativity is about to be released! Quickly learn the fundamentals of color mixing, brushstrokes, and more. Then move right ahead to success, thanks to a selection of 50 stunning pictures to paint. Best of all, the projects can be completed in 30 minutes! From beautiful botanicals and fabulous florals to animals and trendy designs, the projects are approachable and fun, and there’s something for every style. Each of the 50 simple tutorials is broken down into key steps so you can clearly see how to begin your painting, layer color, and add detail. Also included are hand-drawn patterns you can trace onto your watercolor pad, brush recommendations, helpful tips, and color palettes to try. The lessons here introduce you to the magic of watercolor, spark your creativity, and provide you with a place to explore and discover your inner artist.

I think this is my 3rd book about watercolours and each of them start with the basics (wet-on-wet technique, wet-on-dry, etc…) so initially I ment to only skim this part but I was nicely surprised that I still got to learn something new.

I had a lot of fun practicing those; however, I treated the paintings more as doodles and not separate pieces of art.

I didn’t even use proper watercolour paper and just painted them in my art theory journal (yes, what a crime!) so, of course, not everything turned out perfectly.

I would say it’s more for beginners but more advanced students can use it to unwind so if you’re stuck between bigger projects and just want to have some fun like me it’s a great book!

Below check some of the doodles I did along with the book:

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