Book Review: The Complete Urban Sketching Companion

I guess the Urban Sketching Handbook series must have been pretty popular for publisher Quarry Books to come out with this book.

The Complete Urban Sketching Companion is actually compilation of four previously published books for architecture and cityscapes, people and motion, perspective and colour. The artists and authors are Gabriel Campanario, Stephanie Bower and Shari Blaukopf.

If you already own the earlier four books, there's no reason to get this new book because most of the content is the same, and some pages are even laid out exactly the same. There are some additional content but definitely not worth buying a whole new book for just that.

But if you don't already own the previous book, this is a book I can recommend because it features lots of useful drawing tips and techniques. The book doesn't actually teach the technical way to draw but has more on tips to get you to think on how to make your sketches look better. This book is a good compliment to other instructional drawing books you may already have, so this book is great for those who already have some knowledge of drawing.

For example, there's a tip on using foreground and background elements, and overlapping elements, to create the illusion of depth. You'll need to know how to draw already in order to use those tips in your drawing.

This book has 256 pages and is priced at official retail of US $25. The individual books are US $15 each. So I guess getting this book may be more worth the money compared to getting four books which will be US $60 total.

One downside to the book is the size of the book. Individual books are smaller and thinner, and easier to open flat. This book is much thicker but at the same size so opening the pages flat is not possible. They could have combined two pages into one to make a larger squarish page and publish a thinner but bigger book. The examples that run across the page gutter would look so much better if there weren't on the page gutter.

All in all, still worth the money.

The Complete Urban Sketching Companion is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | AU | JP | CN)

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