Taking up drawing and sketching...any good how-to books? (watch, instructions, outdoor)

[Dayton Sux]

Im thinking up taking up drawing and sketching, mainly outdoor scenes like landscapes and cityscapes.

Any good advice on this for textbooks or how-to books on how to start out drawing or tips for the specific type of outdoors "scenery" drawing...how to draw trees, vegetation, grass, clouds, etc.....

[belovenow]

The best thing to do is actually just do it. Start drawing. In art classes you typically start with artificially set-up "still-life" items. For example in the corner of the class my teacher would put a vase on a small piece of cloth and then ask us to take a couple classes to draw it. He wouldn't move it nor adjust the lighting so we could go back to it another session and pick up where we left off. Your goal as the artist is to try to effectively capture the textures and lighting on those items with your pencil renderings. We went from basic shapes/items to transparent and then even mirrored items. He added artificial flowers, everyday objects such as pencils or phones or other things which had interesting shapes. Folded/Creased cloth is also a challenge and was usually part of each still life. Drawing outdoors is based upon the same principle except that lighting and even the item being drawn will change on you across multiple sessions.

There are a ton of drawing books available for order online. I don't have a specific recommendation but encourage you to look at what your library has to offer before buying something.

Good luck with your new hobby ;-)

[Mack Knife]

Try this. Get a tablet, a real one, not Android or iPad but something running full Windows and with an active tablet display that uses a Wacom stylus, not touch.

Then go draw away with pixel precision. I did just that. I'd take some high resolution pictures and then draw on them to see how close I could get. Sure it was a lot like copying but it was really fun to do and I learned a lot.

After you're done, you remove the picture and are left with only what you drew. A real eye opener.

The Microsoft Surface Pro 3 are pretty good but the ones from Motion Computing and high end Fujitsu are really good too.

If you can, borrow one and give it a whirl.

[AksarbeN]

I think you could find lots of instructions and information on sketching by watching some of the Youtube videos.

[WyoNewk]

I took a drawing class at our local community college and would suggest you consider the same if there's one available. I took it because I'd never been able to draw anything, and because I thought it would help me (as a photographer) to learn more about lighting. (It did, very much so.)

We mostly learned a different type of drawing every week -- learned it in class, then did a drawing each week as homework. I sold one of them a couple times (to large corporations for advertising graphics) and still have a couple others hanging in my home/office. I do a lot of work for various artists, so it's nice to have something I actually did myself to show them. Mine's not as nearly as good as any of theirs, but it's something to talk about.