Perspective For The Absolute Beginner

Perspective made simple. How to draw in a realistic style. Perspective is arguably the most important element of drawing and also one of the most difficult to master. It's what gives drawings dimension and is the key to realistic drawing. Now the best-selling authors of Drawing for the Absolute Beginner are here to demystify perspective, simplify concepts such as vanishing points and multi-point perspective, and make it easy for you to experience success...and have fun while you're doing it. • Tricks and techniques for creating depth and dimension using lines (linear perspective), values (atmospheric perspective) and color. • 23 mini demonstrations on how to apply basic principles of perspective make getting started easy. • 12 full step-by-step demonstrations, each with a structural drawing, cover a variety of subjects, including interiors, architecture and still lifes. • Starting with a simple box to illustrate fundamental concepts, artists will develop a working understanding of how to cast any subject in realistic depth and dimension. This book puts it all into perspective.

Open this book as an absolute beginner, and come away as a proud portrait artist. Mark and Mary Willenbrink's Absolute Beginner books have helped thousands of novices tap into their inner artists. In this book, Mark and Mary help the beginning artist take on portraits, showing that absolutely anyone can draw faces. Their encouraging, easy-to-follow instruction style makes learning fun—you'll be amazed by how quickly you achieve impressive results. Drawing Portraits for the Absolute Beginner covers everything from warming up with sketches, and capturing facial expressions, to framing your finished work. Page by page, you'll build the skills and confidence you need to draw lifelike portraits of your friends and family. What's Inside: • A simple two-stage approach to drawing portraits: sketch a likeness, then build up values to bring it to life • Step-by-step instruction for drawing eyes, noses, mouths, hairstyles, hands, glasses and other tricky elements • 13 complete demonstrations featuring a range of ages and ethnicities • Tips for evoking more personality in your portraits by using props, costumes and accessories

This inspiring book makes drawing in a realistic style easier than you may think and more fun than you ever imagined. Authors Mark and Mary Willenbrink (Watercolor for the Absolute Beginner) cover it all—from choosing materials and the correct way to hold your pencil, to expert advice on the tricky stuff, like getting proportions and perspective right, drawing reflections, and designing strong compositions. (It's not as scary as it sounds…not with Mark and Mary as your guide!) At the heart of this book, a series of fun, hands-on exercises help you practice and perfect your strokes—24 mini-demos lead up to 9 full step-by-step demos. Each exercise builds on the previous one as you develop your skills, build your confidence, and enjoy yourself along the way. The lessons you learn by drawing simple subjects such as coffee mugs, clouds and trees will help you take on progressively more challenging matter like animals, still lifes, landscapes and portraits…the kinds of subjects and scenes you've always dreamt of drawing. This book is just the ticket for budding artists of any age. It's never too early and never too late to discover the pure joy of drawing.

Have you ever experienced the peace of walking through the woods or the excitement of a storm gathering on a beach? Drawing Nature for the Absolute Beginner will help you capture these moments in artwork and share them others. In their fun and friendly teaching style, Mark and Mary Willenbrink offer a great beginner's course on drawing nature, showing you how to realistically capture the world around you. All you need to get started are some simple supplies, basic techniques, and inspiration. From field to forest, beach or mountain, begin with a structural sketch, apply values and textures, and, before you know it, you'll be drawing everything you see. You'll even learn how to render favorite wildlife such as chipmunks, deer and eagles! • Follow along with easy step-by-step demonstrations to draw rocks, seashells, butterflies and even more developed nature scenes. • Gain a working understanding of key concepts such as perspective, value and composition. • Discover simple tools and tips you can use right away to improve your art.

The 35th anniversary edition of the classic how-to book that has helped millions of artists learn to draw. When it was originally published in 1970, How to Draw What You See zoomed to the top of Watson-Guptill’s best-seller list—and it has remained there ever since. “I believe that you must be able to draw things as you see them—realistically,” wrote Rudy de Reyna in his introduction. Today, generations of artists have learned to draw what they see, to truly capture the world around them, using de Reyna’s methods. How to Draw What You See shows artists how to recognize the basic shape of an object—cube, cylinder, cone, or sphere—and use that shape to draw the object, no matter how much detail it contains.

If you are new to both JavaScript and programming, this hands-on book is for you. Rather than staring blankly at gobbledygook, you'll explore JavaScript by entering and running hundreds of code samples in Firebug, a free JavaScript debugger. Then in the last two chapters, you'll leave the safety of Firebug and hand-code an uber cool JavaScript application in your preferred text editor. Written in a friendly, engaging narrative style, this innovative JavaScript tutorial covers the following essentials: Core JavaScript syntax, such as value types, operators, expressions, and statements provided by ECMAScript. Features for manipulating XHTML, CSS, and events provided by DOM. Object-oriented JavaScript, including prototypal and classical inheritance, deep copy, and mixins. Closure, lazy loading, advance conditional loading, chaining, currying, memoization, modules, callbacks, recursion, and other powerful function techniques. Encoding data with JSON or XML. Remote scripting with JSON-P or XMLHttpRequest Drag-and-drop, animated scrollers, skin swappers, and other cool behaviors. Optimizations to ensure your scripts run snappy. Formatting and naming conventions to prevent you from looking like a greenhorn. New ECMAScript 5, DOM 3, and HTML 5 features such as Object.create(), Function.prototype.bind(), strict mode, querySelector(), querySelectorAll(), and getElementsByClassName(). As you can see, due to its fresh approach, this book is by no means watered down. Therefore, over the course of your journey, you will go from JavaScript beginner to wizard, acquiring the skills recruiters desire.