any art books that empathizes heavily on spatial reasoning?

11:19 PM, Tuesday May 10th 2022

I'm looking for an art book that goes heavily into spatial reasoning and construction, similar to whats being taught here.

A lot of the popular ones seems to be about observational drawing only, and the books that do go into construction tend to be very advanced.

1 users agree
2:27 AM, Wednesday May 11th 2022

Scott Robertson's "How to Draw"

1:17 PM, Wednesday May 11th 2022

Thank you!

0 users agree
12:04 PM, Wednesday May 11th 2022
edited at 12:08 PM, May 11th 2022

Dynamic Bible by Peter Han is a very practical book;

It handles spatial reasoning adequately without being too technical.

In fact, I believe part of the Drawabox curriculum is based on teachings from the author of that one.

Successful Drawing by Andrew Loomis is also (somewhat) simple to understand and apply.

On the other hand, Scott Robertson's How to Draw is often complicated to understand, especially if you don't have much experience in the field of spatial reasoning.

edited at 12:08 PM, May 11th 2022
1:16 PM, Wednesday May 11th 2022

Thank you! I’ll go check them out.

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Framed Ink

Framed Ink

I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.

Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.

Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.

Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.

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