Ten-Step Drawing: Flowers - Review

Ten-Step Drawing: Flowers

By: Walter Foster Creative Team

Publication: August 7th 2018 by Walter Foster Publishing

128 pages

Genre: Non-fiction, Arts, Crafts

Source: Publisher via NetGalley (Thank you!!)

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Goodreads description--Featuring illustrated tutorials for drawing 75 different flowers, Ten-Step Drawing: Flowers breaks down each subject into 10 simple steps; moreover, all you need is a pen or pencil and a piece of paper!

Handy prompts help artists by encouraging artistic individuality, as well as helpful tips for drawing other subjects not featured in the book. Ten-Step Drawing: Flowers is sure to encourage even the most reluctant amateur artist to break out a pen and paper and doodle to their heart’s content! !

After my failed attempt at Ten-Step Drawing: Animals, I was afraid that Ten-Step Drawing: Flowers would follow the same path to DNF. But as it turns out, flowers are a little bit less complicated than animals--at least for me.

One thing I've learned over the years with my attempts to draw is that I don't respond well to starting off with circles and guidelines. I mean yes sometimes I use them, but not nearly so much as these books do. Perhaps, that might be one of the reasons why I'm not as skilled as I'd like to be. But once I get a circle down on my paper--no matter how lightly drawn--I can't seem to get passed that shape and transform it into something else. So in this way, these tutorials didn't serve me well.

I think for me it would have been better to focus on one flower or bloom and get it down quite well before doing groups of each particular flower. I suppose the groupings were to show the different possible positioning of each flower type, but I just needed more detail on one flower or petal even to get the general guidelines before moving into groupings.

I also mentioned this in my review on Ten-Step Drawing: Animals, but I didn't like that one step wasn't just one line. One step could actually be broken down quite extensively sometimes. So this felt like stretching the title a bit in my opinion. Perhaps I'm too literal.

I didn't enjoy Ten-Step Drawing: Flowers as much as I hoped I would but I did finish it feeling challenged. This to me is probably the perfect place to be. I don't want to finish a drawing tutorial book feeling like I can already do the art available without the help of the book such as I felt with Anywhere, Anytime Art: Colored Pencil, but I also don't want to feel as though I'll never be able to achieve any of the subject matter in my own art such as I felt with Ten-Step Drawing: Animals. That being said, Ten-Step Drawing: Flowers lands right in the middle with a 3 Star rating. Have you read Ten-Step Drawing: Flowers? What did you think? Let me know!