Belleville-Van Stone - Sketch!: The Non-Artists Guide to Inspiration, Technique, and Drawing Daily Life

Copyright 2014 by France Belleville-Van Stone

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Watson-Guptill Publications, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.watsonguptill.com

WATSON-GUPTILL is a registered trademark, and the WG and Horse designs are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Belleville-Van Stone, France.
Sketch! / France Belleville-Van Stone. First Edition.
pages cm
1. DrawingTechnique. I. Title.
NC650.B45 2014
741.2dc23
2014012253

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-38534-609-2
eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-34-610-8

Design by Michelle Thompson
Cover Design by Angelina Cheney and Christina Jirachachavalwong

v3.1

Contents

CHAPTER 1
PRELIMINARIES

CHAPTER 2
SUPPLIES

CHAPTER 3
BASIC TECHNIQUES

CHAPTER 4
DRAWING WHEN TIME AND RESOURCES ARE LIMITED

CHAPTER 5
GOING DIGITAL

CHAPTER 6
PROMPTS

Think about what got you fired up as a kid when you played. Was it building forts, organizing tea time, making snow igloos, or fishing? Personally, I cannot dissociate my childhood memories from LEGO bricks. Most of my time that wasnt dedicated to school was spent playing with them. I had two giant boxes of pieces, plus a bunch of flat LEGO building plates. I loved building houses. I would spend entire afternoons on an optimal home floor plan, and because I had so many pieces, I could really go to town: patios, four bedrooms, big tables, big beds, two-car garages, and wide hallways. I would work on a house for hours on end, looking forward to then putting the little LEGO guys in, choosing the right cars for them, and, finally, playing with the house I had just built.

Each time, I would be so excited about the prospect of having a new house to play with, and inevitably, once it was built, my interest would fade and die almost instantly. Within a day, I would dismantle the building I had just made and start a new one from scratch.

Only later did I finally understand that I got my kicks not out of playing with each house, but out of building them. It was the process of building that had me all fired up. Once that stage was over, so was the fun. Even though my goal starting every house was to see the finished product and use it as the backdrop to my little LEGO stories, the biggest stimulus was building. The search for the right piece to fit in a little corner, which would then have me run into other pieces that I would use, the choices I would make along the way, all this was playing LEGO.

Drawing is very much like building a LEGO house. There may or may not be much planning involved, but while your goal is to produce a drawing, you will find that the real joy of drawing lies in the drawing process itself: the subject, paper, paper orientation, pen, pencil, size, speed, pressure, color, strokes, angles, and mess ups.

This book is about celebrating the little journey we take every time we sketch. It offers some how-tos, what to draw with, what to draw on, and creativity promptsin other words, what will get you to simply draw.

Have you ever wanted to simply draw but didnt because you did not know what to start with? Is your lack of training a source of inhibition? Have you ever felt a longing for artistic creativity but shunned drawing because you saw it as a skill that couldnt enable you to make a living? Have you ever felt eager to document the world around you but always felt poorly qualified to do so? Have you ever needed a creative kick-start but never knew where to turn? Have you ever felt discouraged by your own incapacity to lay something right on paper?