Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner

Based upon the author’s own successful workshops, Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner helps new artists create competent, often eloquent drawings. A series of progressive lessons demonstrates such essential skills as recording edges, creating dimension, adding accuracy, developing value, balancing compositional elements, and drawing the human face, both frontal and profile views. Step by step, readers learn how to create a reasonable likeness of an object and give it spatial depth using such simple black-and-white mediums as pens, pencils, charcoal, and graphite wash. Inspirational examples and tips for success from beginning students who have worked on the same material confirm readers’ successes, and allow readers to consider the advice and impressions of others at the same level.

Claire Watson Garcia is a faculty member at Silvermine School of Art in New Canaan, CT. Her “Absolute and Utter Beginner” courses and workshops geared toward beginning artists have been popular for 20 years. She lives in Ridgefield, CT.