Draw Buildings and Cities in 15 Minutes: Amaze Your Friends With Your Drawing Skills Paperback – May 2, 2017

If you are a beginner at drawing, this book is for you. It gives good advice in a straightforward way. If you are beyond the novice stage, look elsewhere.

Easy to follow and well organized. Great info and ideas.

Product arrived on time and good condition, but absolutely not what i expected. Purchased as a gift for 14-15 year old (secretly thought I might enjoy as well. Completely off the mark. A collection of finished sketches 95% done. Not interesting nor instructing.

Exactly what I needed

Helping my son work toward becoming and architect.

Not what I expected. Not a book for beginners.

I enjoy the way this guide is written. The techniques and advice are practical, useful. It feels like the author is chatting with me… Kind of in my head and knows what I’m thinking and my drawing struggles. Then he addresses those struggles. And so I feel understood, more open to learning and trying his strategy and a little more confident. Well done!

Having sketched most of my life, I lack the rigor to be a “true artist”. When I was in high school, I loved to draw, but had little patience to really learn to do it well. I then spent 20 years on a drawing board drafting mechanical parts and schematics. Trust me, this is not “artistic”. However I still did “hand-done” 3D machine sketches to provide with estimates or to describe something, I was working on. So you see where I’m going. These two parts of my brain were very separate. Orthographic projection (most mechanical drawings) deals with a lot of detail, but even then you don’t dimension or include everything. So where am I going with this? This book discusses the mechanics of drawing pictures of cityscapes and brings in some fundamental drawing principles.Many aspects of a good drawing are:**** What are the boundaries of your drawing?**** What level of detail do you plan to incorporate?Items such as this; despite knowing enough to do this in mechanical drawing, I never put in practice in my hand sketches, so often I had unbalanced sketches, of way too much detail in areas, I did not care about. Maybe you do too. This book if you put some of the ideas in practice will help you sort that out.Some of the way it does that is in the chapters below.INTRODUCTION:Exploring why you want to draw and the equipment necessary to do so.FUNDAMENTAL DRAWING SKILLS:I found this section essential. There are somethings as a sketcher, I have never done properly. This gives you a whole bunch of common sense tips and tricks, that to be honest, never dawned on me. I and maybe you start sketching and then wonder what happened. This section helps you frame what you want to draw and helps you make those decisions upfront, so by the time you are drawing you have a clear path. None of it is hard.BEGINNING THE DRAWING:Imagine this, starting with a rough framework and then steps to work to what your desired end product is.COMMON CHALLENGES AND STRATEGIES:What makes this book work is all the sketches inside showing what the artist means. It helps with the why and when.LIGHT AND SHADE:This is a great section that no beginning artist thinks through fully. It helps you do understand why, good artists drawings look better.ENTOURAGE:All the other stuff that is around buildings, trees, vehicles & people. Completes the drawing. However you get to pick or choose what you include. The drawing should represent what you want to portray, not a 100% faithful reproduction.CONCLUSIONIn the end it takes practice. You also need to learn from your failures. Essentially, what you might consider a failure is when you don’t achieve what you set out to do. This is a learning opportunity, not so much a failure as you are practicing. Further advice to try new approaches once you get into a rut, as it will only freshen up your skill set.Overall this is a great book with valuable advice and I hope to get cracking on drawing again, as I feel this has given me some great pointers.

It is full of drawings drawn on a computer pad, so no real pencil graphics, and the instructions for how to work or exercises are of little use.

Very brief introduction to the subject with no projects to speak of.

I bought this book yesterday, and already feel much more confident about drawing buildings after scanning through it. The author breaks down the process in a straightforward manner, and it all makes so much sense...Highly recommended for anyone wanting to try drawing city-scapes.

Brilliant little book.. Clearly explains all helpful tips for measuring, perspective and many more useful aspects of drawing.

Was a bit disappointed with the book, there's not many pages in it, but you get what you pay for I guess. It's OK.