Book Review: Sketching: The Basics

This is the second book put out by Roselien Steur and Koos Essen, both educators who teaches design sketching. The first book Sketching: Drawing Techniques for Product Designers was also on sketching. This book is marketed as the prequel.

The focus here is on getting the basics. There are seven chapters but in general covers techniques on drawing geometry, choosing the correct viewpoint, and adding colours and details. It's not totally basic though, some prior knowledge of perspective drawing will be extremely beneficial.

The examples provided are well illustrated and explained. There are lots of tips even for something as simple as drawing a cube, the basic building block. Every page is packed with information and beautiful designs. I like that there are a few real world case studies for each chapter.

The book could do better with a few detailed step-by-step construction of the example products, from start to finish. The way it's presented now is basically having sketches on the page, and focusing on a few parts, such as drawing rounded corners for phones and only that. The section on colouring should also be broken into steps to show how certain effects are achieved, like blending chalk with markers to get a nice gradated effect.

Overall, it's a very informative book. I'm not a product designer but I found certain sections helpful, especially the chapter on using the appropriate viewpoint to highlight product features.

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