Sketching People, Lynne Chapman – Book Review

Time to review the other urban sketching book that I bought on Christmas Day.  This one is a 128 page paperback but feels much longer.  I’ve only just completed my second read.  It takes days to get through because the material in it is so dense that you need to keep taking breaks.

The book is a mixture of instructional and inspirational.  I found the best of the four chapters to be the one on getting started.  As well as the usual stuff on materials, there was. A lot in this chapter about portraiture.  How to draw eyes, ears, mouths, noses, ears, etc.  The great thing about this chapter was the number of examples within it.  I’m looking right now at side-on drawings of three different ears and there’s commentary there on what makes them all different from each other, which translates into what to look out for when drawing ears.

There are chapters on different drawing styles and on how to draw moving people.  These fall somewhere between instructional and inspirational.  It’s like here are lots of different ideas you could try and examples of drawings that use them.

And there’s one chapter on where to find people to draw.  There’s all the usual stuff about trains, concerts, parks, etc.  To be honest, all of the instructional stuff in this chapter could fit on a single page.  This chapter is really about inspiration.  Although there’s also some stuff about the different challenges that the artist faces in all these different places (like how people shift round more if they’re reading the newspaper than if they’re reading books, that sort of thing).  It’s the weakest of the four chapters but still useful.

And, as I sad at the start, the result is that this book feels like much more than 128 pages.  It’s not like a Dan Brown thriller that you can bash through in a couple of hours.  It’s one to read over a long period with occasional breaks.

It’s one of those rare books that scores five palettes.