Spending time drawing is something I never thought I would do. But after this experience, I was so inspired that I couldn’t help myself. Thankfully, my school art department has some generous resources so I got to choose from this entire range/series of books.

I always love reading book reviews and getting a glimpse of what others think, so here’s the lowdown of my experience with these books!

Of all the variety that there was available from school, I practiced self-control and just chose two books – 20 Ways to Draw a Tree and 44 Other Nifty Things from Nature and 20 Ways to Draw a Doodle and 44 Other Zigzags, Twirls, Spirals, and Teardrops.

Overview:

The books in the 20 Ways to Draw series have 900 illustrations and examples in each book. There around 45 different topics in each book and various examples of the topic in each. That said, some of the topics overlap between books. For example, there are tree drawings in both 20 Ways to Draw a Doodle and 20 Ways to Draw a Tree books. But since the books have different illustrators, the ideas have different styles.

What I love:

Starting points.

The book gives plenty of inspiration and starting points for various levels, from simple to more detailed or complicated drawings.

Easy to copy.

The drawings are easy to copy and can be easily duplicated.

Flexibility to use different mediums.

I started with just markers and a pen, but I can imagine that these would also be fun to experiment with using watercolors and paints.

Promotes room for creativity.

There are blank spaces in every section for you to practice and experiment. I just used a blank notebook, blank space is available if you need it!

Lots of possibilities.

With all the possibilities, this book appeals to both amateur and more advanced artists as a source of inspiration.

Could be better:

It’s hard to come up with disadvantages, but if anything, it’s difficult to know what kind of illustrations will be in each book (in terms of topics) unless you flip through it, which is hard to do via the internet.

Overall thoughts:

While flipping/thumbing through these books is inspiring, I didn’t realize that drawing from them would be even more exciting! I was so inspired that I kept going. The beautiful thing about drawing from these books is that the sky’s the limit! It’s a good starting point for drawing, and provides some basis or structure for how to draw. Once your creativity gets loose, there are endless possibilities.

From a creative standpoint, I would totally purchase this series and get a copy of each book if I could because there are great pluses to this book. But I think it would be a great idea to share these with a friend so you have the option to be inspired by multiple books!

The pages with color are my favorite, but overall I love the resource that this book provides. I think which specific book titles to get would really depend on your style and object preferences, but I liked the ones I chose, and especially want to check out 20 Ways to Draw a Tulip and 44 Other Fabulous Flowers next!

TL;DR

Get this book!