Art Book Review: The Art of Pencil Drawing by Gene Franks

The key to pencil drawing is practice, as it is with almost everything else. Practicing takes dedication, especially when you keep practicing and you're still not getting the results you want from your pencil drawing. One of the cheapest ways to improve your pencil drawing is to purchase an art how-to book. There are lots of books centered around improving your pencil drawings. If you are looking for one of these books to read and practice with, The Art of Pencil Drawing by Gene Franks is a great one. This book covers almost everything you could ever want to draw from buildings to people, and much more.

Review of The Art of Pencil Drawing: tools and techniques
The most important part of pencil drawing is knowing how to use your materials. This book does a great job of explaining how to use pencils, and how each one is different and each one will give you a different outcome. It also goes over the basic techniques of pencil drawing and makes these techniques easy to replicate. Something that a lot of drawing books skip over is shading, but not this book. There is a whole section dedicated to teach you all the different ways you can change and how to avoid value breaks and even more great tips and tricks for drawing.

Review of The Art of Pencil Drawing: still lives, buildings, and transportation
One of the best things about this art book is that is has so many different examples and each one with something different that you can learn from. There are lots of different examples of still lives and how you can use the shading to give your drawing a realistic look. There are also a lot of different styles of buildings that incorporate different techniques such as hatching and cross hatching. The Art of Pencil Drawing also demonstrates things such as cars, boats, and trains, to show a beginner how to draw these things from start to finish.

Review of The Art of Pencil Drawing: landscapes
One of the best things about this art drawing book is that it guides you through the entire drawing process. It has progression pictures so that you know how to go about beginning a pencil drawing and continuing to make it look great. With landscapes, the book does a great job at showing you how to add the little details that make all the difference in a drawing. The only negative thing is that the examples are, in fact, very detailed, which may be hard for a beginner to recreate.

Review of The Art of Pencil Drawing: animals and people
This part of The Art of Pencil Drawing is one of the best parts of the book. The animals used as examples are explained very well and make it extremely easy for aspiring artists to follow the instructions and make their own art look just as great as the examples in this art book. This book does not do people by their parts, rather it focuses on the steps it takes to get a person to look realistic and capture their character. It focuses on the symmetry of the face and how to make a person look balanced as well as realistic. Keep in mind that the people drawn in this book are just that, realistic, and can be very hard to recreate even with the help of the book.