Everyday Sketching and Drawing: Five Steps to a Unique and Personal Sketchbook Habit

Everyday Sketching and Drawing offers an easy-to-follow, 5-step formula, which teaches beginner-friendly techniques for learning the skills necessary to make drawing and sketching an everyday habit.

For those who have always wanted to or tried and failed to learn to draw it provides simple step-by-step instruction, plus easy-to-follow practice exercises, and provides the motivation and inspiration readers need to be successful.

For those who already draw, Everyday Sketching and Drawing offers another technique to add to their drawing arsenal. Why do so many adults come to view drawing as difficult or fraught with anxiety? Traditional art instruction is often bogged down with jargon, rules, and admonishments that unintentionally stifle the joy of drawing for its own sake.

Steven Reddy's new and easy approach to drawing instructs sketchers to document their unique and compelling lives in realistic yet playful sketches that record the places, spaces, and objects that help define them as individuals. He reminds artists to slow down, notice, and attend to the sketch-worthy scenes and subjects that are unstaged and always there in our everyday lives.

He offers a versatile technique that can lead to a skill that fills sketchbooks with the visual details that differentiate one life from another. This approach is a meditative, relaxing alternative to academic concerns about perspective, proportion, and accuracy.

Reddy encourages artists to capture in whimsical but detail-specific illustrations their unique, subjective interpretation of their visual surroundings.

Steven Reddy's drawing method produces extremely detailed and realistic scenes of objects and scenes in everyday life in a relatively short period of time (60 minutes to 3 hours or more, depending on the sketcher's preference).

Modifying a technique utilized by Old Master oil painters, the drawings pass through 5 clearly articulated stages where each step focuses on one visual concept at a time.

Steven B. Reddy teaches drawing and illustration at Gage Academy of Art in Seattle. He has also taught for the Seattle Public Schools since 1998. Reddy has a passion for creating detailed illustrations of urban scenes, cluttered interiors, and complex still lifes on location in ink and watercolor. His drawings from China and Mexico appear in Danny Gregory's An Illustrated Journey. Reddy also self-published Now Where Was I? An Illustrated Memoir, which showcases drawings that span 35 years from his daily sketchbook diaries.

Gary Faigin trained at the Art Students League of New York and at the École Nationale Supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris. He has taught at the National Academy School of Design and at Parsons School of Design; currently he is the artistic director of the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, which he also co-founded. He's the best-selling author of The Artist's Complete Guide to Facial Expressions, an art instruction classic.

Stephanie Bower is an architectural illustrator, workshop instructor, blog correspondent for Seattle Urban Sketchers, and author of The Urban Sketching Handbook: Understanding Perspective.