Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As lots of others have said, the title of this book is extremely misleading. Not only does the book teach basically no drawing basics, it contains virtually no information on drawing anything other than imaginary buildings or machines. If you want to draw people, animals, environments that actually exist, or anything like that, this book won't help you at all. There's also nothing in this "How to Draw" book about value or shading, at all. The book seems to be written by working concept artists for other working concept artists. Why someone already gainfully employed in their chosen profession would need a manual on the rudiments of their craft is a mystery for you to solve, dear reader. Having said that, I purchased this book well aware of what kind of book it was based on recommendations from other people who had used it. Even so, I found the book disappointing. While the techniques the authors lay out definitely work, they're also extremely tedious and result in ugly drawings rife with unnecessary construction lines. All of that wouldn't be so bad if the authors did a better job of organizing their information and explaining things. At numerous points in the book, the exercises expect you to be able to apply skills that earlier exercises barely taught at all, explained in a completely different context, or sometimes didn't even teach. This makes working through the book an arduous process. An infuriating aspect of the book is ridiculous amount of physical and electronic drafting tools you're expected to have on hand if you want to emulate the instructors' techniques. For example, to accurately reproduce what the authors do in the book you'll need a full set of ellipse templates (~$400), an eleven-point scale divider ($150-$300, if you can even find one for sale), and a golden ratio caliper or divider (~$70). That just the physical stuff. The authors state that free 3D modeling software like SketchUp can be used to emulate some of the stuff they do in the book. Then they go on to (with a single exception) only use MODO and use it to do things SketchUp can't. A perpetual MODO license with maintenance added costs (try to keep a straight face, folks) $2,000. You can find cheaper workarounds to some of the drafting tools and software the authors use, but you won't find how to do so in the book. Finally, and somewhat ironically considering the book was written by designers, the physical book isn't well-designed. While the pages are nice and heavy, the binding is dime store novel tier. The book won't lie flat, so you have to crack the spine wherever you want the book to stay open without using binder clips or dropping something heavy onto it to hold it open. This frustrating in any kind of book, but in a manual/textbook where you're supposed to do exercises out of the book while referring to it, it's an unacceptable oversight. I don't understand why this book has so many five-star reviews. It isn't useless, but it's not one of the better instructional art books I've read. If you're interested in a somewhat similar style of drawing presented in a much better way that also teaches you to draw things other than stuff that looks like it should appear exclusively on prog rock album covers, I'd recommend Peter Han's Dynamic Sketching course and/or his Dynamic Sketching and Dynamic Bible books which, unfortunately, are often sold out and quite expensive when they are in stock.