Book Review: Drawn to Drawing by John Vernon Lord

John Vernon Lord is an artist from England born in 1939. He has been drawing for over 50 years. He has drawn for books like Aesop's Fables, many children classic's such as Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Shark, and he has also written and illustrated books himself, with The Giant Jam Sandwich being the most popular and has been in print for over thirty years.

Drawn to Drawing is in essence a sketchbook. It collects pen and ink drawings, doodles and diary entries. Lord likes to use cross hatching for his ink drawings, and occasionally some gouache and watercolour. There are few commissioned works but the bulk are his personal sketches.

His sketchbook pages are filled to the brim, sometimes with seemingly disconnected ideas, sometimes with his diary entries written meticulously that fills up the pages. A magnifying glass is needed if you want to read the handwritten notes on his sketchbook. There are quick doodles drawn during meetings as well as those that take him over 200 hours to complete. I particularly enjoy his detail pen and ink works. There's both a comic art and at times editorial feel to them. Starting out as a freelance illustrator, he draws everything.

Every decade starting from the 1950s is headed by a memoir talking about his work during those 10 years. You'll get a perspective of what life is like for an illustrator living in the 1950s and follow his career from a student until he became a university professor who teaches illustration.

It's a book that illustrators might find interesting, a good retrospective of Lord's sketches and thoughts.

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