Search - All About Techniques in Drawing (All about Techniques: Art)

I'm glad I got this book through my local library, because it was not nearly as useful as I'd hoped. The text is small, dense and tight, making it difficult to read, and the writing style is fussily academic rather than practical. I got the feeling that it was more important to the writers to spout off information bytes A, B, and C than to make sure it was really comprehended by either writer or reader. "There, we covered it; now you can go take the test." The sections on much of the media covered are so brief and generalized that you really don't know that much more after reading them. I think it would be better to get higher quality books dedicated to each topic, but even as an overview I didn't find this book very helpful.

I actually gave up on reading it through as I had originally planned because the small type size literally hurt my eyes. I just flipped through after the first couple chapters. The sections on each medium tend to contain rather dogmatic statements such as "It is important to bear in mind that colored pencils provide the best results when they are used as a drawing medium rather than as a painting medium" (p60). I feel that, firstly, artists generally know to avoid such statements of absolute "can't" as some upstart is sure to prove them wrong, and secondly, it's likely that advances in media manufacture will eventually render many such statements obsolete. They are statements of opinion given out as fact. In the artist's world, "rules" are for breaking!

There has got to be a better general manual on drawing out there, somewhere. At the very least, one with bigger text.