Veronica Lawlor

mixed media/drawing exercises/intermediate level. Not that useful, and probably should not be called a daily-lesson/6-week course unless you are in the habit of taking long vacations and have readily accessible museums, botanical gardens, and a variety of street/city scenes to draw from (you can find images and videos on the internet if you are housebound, but I sense that that might be frowned upon). Perhaps there are many aspiring artists who have time to make these daily excursions, but the casual dabbler will probably need to space them out more.
Note that this isn't intended for beginners looking for instruction, as there is very little of that--more like threads of ideas and directions to explore. The exercises also call for a variety of drawing tools/media, so there could be a substantial upfront cost to these suggestions, depending on how closely you want to follow them.… (mais)

I think my main source of disappointment with this book was that it was not what I was expecting. Based on it's title, you'd expect a guided course of a new drawing each day (still life, portrait, blind contour, urban sketching, etc.), but it was really a series of projects to study different types of media, mixed media, etc. The author seemed to think that the reader should have a large variety of tools and media (the supplies list had well over a doze types of media, with many more listed as optional or suggested for use in the exercises) and not alternatives were ever given (ex: in many of the exercises, you could use everyday pens instead of fancy fountain pens and/or nibs). I can see the value of exploring different media types, but, as mentioned before, I was expecting different *drawing* ideas.

All that said, there were some interesting ideas and some explorative exercises that I will try.… (mais)