Book Review: The Urban Sketching Handbook: People and Motion: Tips and Techniques for Drawing on Location

Nice collection of handy tips on sketching people

There are two publishers for this book as far as I know. One's Quarry Books and the other Basheer Graphic Books.

This book on people and motion is the second in the Urban Sketching Handbook series. The first one is on architecture and cityscape. The version I bought was from Quarry Books and the book's construction quality is exactly the same as Basheer's version.

Just like the first book, it's still a compact size 112-page paperback.

The book features a bunch of tips on sketching people and figures. These are quite useful tips curated by author and sketcher Gabriel Campanario from various artists. Some tips I use often and some are new ones I can't wait to try. It's nice to see how other artists tackle sketching figures.

There are tips on how you can draw proportional figures, contour drawing, capture gesture, liveliness and action. The book talks about basic proportion for the head and body. What I felt lacking is perhaps there should have been a few more pages on observational drawing techniques such as how to draw a tilting head as you see it. For that, I suggest getting the book Keys to Drawing.

The last section is a gallery of sketches grouped by the type of media they were drawn with.

There's even a list of etiquette tips that talks about how you should react or behave in public, and a helpful list of online links that point to Urban Sketchers, SketchCrawl, The Sketching Forum and Portraits Without Mercy. Check them out.

This book's for beginners with basic drawing skills. The tips provided are easy to follow so it makes figure drawing less daunting and more fun.

The Urban Sketching Handbook: People and Motion: Tips and Techniques for Drawing on Location (Urban Sketching Handbooks) is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP)

Visit Amazon to check out more reviews.

If you buy from the links, I get a little commission that helps me get more books to feature.

Here are direct links to the book:
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr | Amazon.it | Amazon.es | Amazon.co.jp | Amazon.cn