Have you ever experienced the peace of walking through the woods or the excitement of a storm gathering on a beach? Drawing Nature for the Absolute Beginner will help you capture these moments in artwork and share them others. In their fun and friendly teaching style, Mark and Mary Willenbrink offer a great beginner's course on drawing nature, showing you how to realistically capture the world around you. All you need to get started are some simple supplies, basic techniques, and inspiration. From field to forest, beach or mountain, begin with a structural sketch, apply values and textures, and, before you know it, you'll be drawing everything you see. You'll even learn how to render favorite wildlife such as chipmunks, deer and eagles! • Follow along with easy step-by-step demonstrations to draw rocks, seashells, butterflies and even more developed nature scenes. • Gain a working understanding of key concepts such as perspective, value and composition. • Discover simple tools and tips you can use right away to improve your art.

In straightforward text complemented by step-by-step illustrations, dozens of exercises lead the hand and mind through creating accurate reproductions of plants and animals as well as landscapes, skies, and more. Laws provides clear, practical advice for every step of the process for artists at every level, from the basics of choosing supplies to advanced techniques.

In his time, Thomas Hill, a British-born painter who worked extensively in the American West during the second half of the nineteenth century, earned favorable comparison with Albert Bierstadt in the East Coast press, and received highest honors for landscape painting at the Philadelphia Centennial. By the late 1860s, his monumental canvases of Yosemite commanded five thousand dollars apiece and attracted national critical acclaim. Hill is generally associated with those paintings of Yosemite and other grand landscapes and his The Driving of the Last Spike. These large-scale compositions, however, incompletely represent Thomas Hill's talents and enthusiams. Some of the artist's finest achievements are realized in smaller paintings, classified as oil sketches, of subjects as diverse as Newport, Rhode Island, Lake Tahoe in California, and the Pacific Northwest. These modest works attest to Hill's powers of observation, his abilities to render immediate descriptions of his subjects, and his enchantment with his motifs. Oil sketches - usually made on board or paper and under sixteen-by-twenty inches - comprise a significant portion of Thomas Hill's work. Spontaneously executed, they capture the artist's direct responses to nature. As a body they offer immediacy and visual delight, as well as insights into the artist's broad interests and the cultural context in which he worked. And because they represent, in many cases, the only surveying evidence of larger-scale paintings made from them, the oil sketches are key to documenting Hill's career. - excerpted from the essay by Janice T. Driesbach. -- from front cover flap.

In this stimulating, thought-provoking guide, a noted sculptor and teacher demonstrates how to discover a rich new design source in the abstractions inherent in natural forms. Through systematic study of such properties as line, form, shape, mass, pattern, light and dark, space, proportion, scale, perspective, and color as they appear in nature, students can learn to utilize the infinite variety and diversity of those elements as a wellspring of creative abstraction. The author invites students to learn the necessary techniques through a series of projects devoted to exploring and drawing plants, animals, birds, landscapes, seascapes, skies, and more. Lines of growth and structure, water and liquid forms, weather and atmospheric patterns, luminosity in plants and animals, earth colors and lightning are among the sources of abstraction available to the artist who is aware of them. This book will train you to see and use these elements and many more. An intriguing blend of art, psychology, and the natural sciences, Abstraction in Art and Nature is profusely illustrated with over 370 photographs, scientific illustrations, diagrams, and reproductions of works by the great masters. It not only offers a mind-stretching new way of learning and teaching basic design, but deepens our awareness of the natural environment. In short, Mr. Hale's book is an indispensable guide that artists, teachers, and students will want to have close at hand for instruction, inspiration, and practical guidance.

DIVThis inspiring sketchbook is part of the new20 Waysseries from Quarry Books, designed to offer artists, designers, and doodlers a fun and sophisticated collection of illustration fun. Each spread features 20 inspiring illustrated examples of 45 themes - tree, tulip, shell, owl, peacock feather, mushroom, cloud,and much, much more–over 900 drawings, with blank space for you to draw your take on 20 Ways to Draw a Tree./divDIVThis is not a step-by-step technique book--rather, the stylized flowers, trees, leaves, and clouds are simplified, modernized, and reduced to the most basic elements, showing you how simple abstract shapes and forms meld to create the building blocks of any item that you want to draw. Each of the 20 interpretations provides a different, interesting approach to drawing a single item, providing loads of inspiration for your own drawing. Presented in the author’s uniquely creative style, this engaging and motivational practice book provides a new take on the world of sketching, doodling, and designing. /divDIVGet out your favorite drawing tool, and remember, there are not just20 Ways to Draw a Tree!/div

This sketchbook helps kids look more closely at nature and capture what they discover with pencil, pen, and paint. The Nature Explorer's Sketchbook inspires exploration, creativity and observation, with beautiful sketchbook illustrations, ideas and tips, and plenty of space for kids to draw. 20 [ages of instruction andcolor illustrations followed by blank pages, with more hints and examples every ten pages. A perfect tool for home schoolers, environmental education programs, STEAM programs, or to give as a gift to young artists and nature lovers. Ages 10+

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