How to Draw What You See

This is the second time I've bought this book. Its a great book to learn from. Usually I end up meeting an aspiring artist who is fascinated with it and I pass it along to help bring one more artist into the world. If you want to learn to draw, this is a great place to start.

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When I was a student I had several books by Rudy de Reyna and gained some unusual techniques from them that have been extremely useful over the intervening decades. However an awful lot of what he was trying to teach went completely over my head and my original books were lent out and never came back. I recently replaced one of them on a whim and enjoyed it so much that I have been gradually re accumulating all of them. On re-acquiring this one I realised how so many of Reyna's ideas have been adopted by others to become the accepted way of tackling drawing and how his demystifying of forms has become mainstream knowledge, rather than the revolutionary approach it once was. Bearing this in mind, I did enjoy the warmth and good nature of the author. My attitude is that if I come to the end of a book inspired to try out a few new techniques or having discovered the solution to a problem that has always irked me, that has been worth the price of the book to me. (Even on a quick flick through the half-remembered text of this one I have already found him addressing and solving a couple of my constant bugbears.) These days I am more interested in the third of the book that concerns painting but am quite happy to go back to the basics of drawing with De Reyna too . There is always something to learn and his explanation of perspective is one of the clearest and least confusing that I have found. For what it's worth, I still feel De Reyna's books are not suitable for complete beginners. (A beginner will need to glean what you can from it and then put it away for later. ) I feel that they were aimed at students who were already rigorously schooled in sketching and drawing and were wanting to advance to a career in illustration. However I don't see this as a big deal since no one book is going to give you everything you need. One of my favourite teaching painters is marvellous at everything except skies, another does superb skies but unconvincing figures and one who is good at nearly everything uses a colour palette that I dislike, so I have tried to learn from the areas I believe that they excel at and disregard the rest. Being a painter means being an eternal student as there will always be struggles and failures along the way which teach you a lot (and gives you plenty of scrap paper to doodle on the back of.) The materials De Reyna suggests need to be changed to more modern alternatives like multi-media paper and Bristol Board and you dont have to follow this book slavishly in method or materials. (I think I originally lost interest when it came to exercises using charcoal which I have never liked using due to fixative allergy, and it never occurred to me to use something else. ) His approach of sorting out all the problems of tone, shape, composition and perspective before you even think of using colour in a painting is one that has stayed with me though and has prevented a lot of frustration and false starts. As far as I am concerned anything that shows the work underlying a piece should be lauded and encouraged as it dispels the idea painters have had a magic wand waved over them in the cradle. I do recommend this book as a classic work of commonsensical instruction in realism that covers a lot of useful topics.

Very helpful book. Love it even though I know few things before but still very good guide and exsersises.

Nice directions, really good to follow.