This is a learn to draw cartoon book and it had more than I expected.
Most draw your own cartoon books assume you know a thing or two about drawing even if it'sa beginners book. This book doesn't do that. It starts off with explaining guidelines and how to use shapes as basic building blocks for your drawings. From there each in it teaches goes though a few steps and reinforces the concepts it taught already.
There's also spots right in the book to draw your own sketches and there are exercises where you have to complete the drawing and such very helpful and fun. Although I'm already okay with drawing cartoons I still found it very helpful and thought that the information it provided was pretty good. A friend who can't draw used the book and was able to follow along and make decent cartoons. With the simple wording and steps with pictures that break all the concepts down very well it's easy for a adult or child to draw the doodles found within this book. Veteran artist or amateur there's a little chunk for everyone.
There's the chapters and 145 pages. They go in order of concepts and slowly add on new skills until the book ends with you drawing and coloring complete cartoon scenes. It starts with the introduction with guidelines and warm ups to get you use to everything, it builds from there adding expressions and clothing.
One thing this book has that I haven't came across in similar books before was a writing section. It's called "write in cartoon calligraphy" and it teaches the basics of the wacky fonts and text we come across in cartons and comics. Along with examples and how to draw the ones in the book it teaches how to uses the other skills in the book to make your own so you can make what ever texts that suit your drawings. Really great especially for beginners as even I still struggle with that and to see that in a beginners books is wonderful. I had to search the internet far and wide to teach myself all the font skills I have now. Here it is in this simple book. Perfect.
It also teaches funny cartoony things (it is a cartoon book after all) like wacky inventions, people and clothing. It teaches how to draw the basics and common stuff and then encourages you to creatively come up with your own and use the ideas you just leaned to do it. Like every other part of the book it guides you with small exercises and steps and premade characters then lets you use your new knowledge to better your skills and draw what ever you want.
The cover is really bright and fun (like cartoons!) and features a lot of the characters that the book teaches you how to draw.
Ready, set, doodle! That's what the back cover says and that's what it is you just get ready and doodle! On the back cover the description mentions you can draw along side with the author and like I mentioned above there are blank spaces next to the premades and steps so you can easily have a spit to draw along with your lesson. There's many other things it offers as well.
All 145 pages are packed with wonderful thing and I highly recommend it for beginners. Even if you don't want to do cartooning it still has a lot of ideas and concepts to teach that you can go on to apply to other types of art such as how to use and follow guidelines and seeing shapes in everything and breaking things done for easy drawing!
I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review
