Created by: Christopher Hart
Publisher: Drawing with Christopher Hart
Genre: Art
ISBN: 978-1-936096-95-4
Pages: 176
Price: $14.95
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If you’re artistically-challenged (like me), drawing all but the simplest things may seem far beyond your talents. Drawing Animals Shape by Shape challenges us to believe otherwise. Starting from circles, squares, rectangles and triangles, Christopher Hart shows us an easy way to master cartoon animals.
Animal categories featured in this guide include dogs, cats, farm animals, woodland creatures, safari animals, birds, water dwellers, reptiles, bugs and dinosaurs. Each animal is shown in various stages as details are added to its basic form. Almost magically, a half circle becomes an owl, a square becomes an elephant, an oval becomes a pig, and a triangle becomes a unicorn. Then the animal is colored as a final touch.
In order to see if this step-by step process actually works, I decided to give it a try, and managed a halfway decent hippopotamus and dinosaur. Making a perfect circle is a challenge for me, but once I had my basic shapes in place, adding the details wasn’t that hard at all. One of the nice features of this book is its spiral binding that allows pages to lie flat while budding artists attempt to copy Hart’s creations. I wish I had a copy of this book when I was younger, since it gives kids the tools to be successful at art. I highly recommend it.
Reviewer: Alice Berger
Bergers Book Reviews 