Drawing Landscapes || Margaret Eggleton

Search Press have reissued this, which first appeared in the Drawing Masterclass series. You can read the original review here.

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Drawing Trees & Flowers || Margaret Eggleton and Denis-John Naylor

This is a bind up of two volumes that have previously appeared. You can read Trees here and Flowers here.

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Landscapes (Drawing Masterclass) || Margaret Eggleton

There’s an excellent variety of material here, including buildings, water, trees, flowers and even a few people. The structure of the book is to have main chapter headings that deal with various landscape elements such as skies, water or man-made structures and then to introduce examples and vignettes before moving on to a specific project that brings everything together. As a way of proceeding, this works very well and the sense of variety is encouraging, both creatively and as a way of drawing you into the book and getting you to explore further. I do have a reservation about some of the illustrations, though. These seem a little less than sharp and I can’t decide whether it’s the reproduction, the method of working or whether they’ve somehow been reduced to a different grayscale to that in which they were made. Other titles in this generally excellent series have crisp outlines, as, indeed, are the majority of those here, so I’m not sure what’s going on.

It’s a worthwhile book, for all that, and should contain pretty well everything you want to know.

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Flowers (Drawing Masterclass) || Margaret Eggleton

It comes as a shock to turn the pages of this interesting guide and find a complete lack of colour. Of course there should be a clue in the title, but we’re so accustomed to colour, both in drawing and in the subject, that it just seems to be a given here. The feeling is also emphasised by the fact that the greys (because this is about line and tone) are quite dark and the images therefore quite strong.

Get past that, though, and what you have is a very nicely done and, in terms of both styles and subject matter, very varied little book. Its stumbling point though, I can’t help thinking, is going to be whether anyone is going to think, “Ah just what I wanted” or, because of its rather hard-edged appearance, “But I do quite fancy trying it”.

There’s a lot you can learn from starting with a drawing, rather than reaching immediately for the paint box; you can learn it here, and I recommend you do. I just don’t think the look and feel of the book are going to help me make my point, though.

	Drawing Masterclass Flowers Book with Margaret Eggleton