People: Super-Quick Techniques for Amazing Drawings

Sketching has become an extremely popular pastime. For example, on YouTube, ＂Tips to Draw Better in 6 Minutes＂ has 1.7 million views, and ＂How to Draw Better in 2 Minutes＂, has 2 million views. Every day, the website @Sketch_Dailies tweets an ＂inspiration＂ to 45,000 followers who can upload their work for juried selection. Why the rage? Simply put, drawing is a fun, meaningful and inexpensive way to spend precious time. It’s a renaissance of paper and pencil, an escape from digital overload.

5-Minute Sketching -- People can help artists of all abilities to nurture their creativity and to develop skills and speed. Each spread features six expert tips and ideas. Examples of amazing 5-minute sketches inspire readers who are short on time or short on ideas, showing how easy it is to make drawing a part of everyday life. There are tips on how to focus on the key elements of a scene, how to capture faces and features quickly, how a variety of techniques can help to create mood and movement.

Here is some of what the book’s four sections cover:

• How to See -- Perspective, scale, foreshortening, viewpoint and resources distance, basic shapes, perfect profiles, proportion, facial features, hair, posture, composition, background, negative space, how to deconstruct figures and faces quickly
• Who to Draw -- Passers-by, crowd scenes, commuters, children, urban scenes, conversation, quick direct poses, master poses (seated, repetitive, dynamic), dance, sports
• Useful Techniques -- Basic shapes, proportion, minimal lines, loose lines, tight lines, thick lines, mark-making, contour drawing, negative space, shading hatching and crosshatching, scribbling, texture, shading, light, tonal values, contrast, color
• Tools and Materials -- Ink, pencil, graphite, colored pencils, markers, paint, pastels, watercolor wash, paper, digital sketching.

Sketching has gone global. The Urban Sketchers community has 62 chapters around the world plus 42,000 members on Facebook and 8,200 Twitter followers. The actual number is surely higher. 5-Minute Sketching -- People is an ideal introduction to a rewarding pastime and a source of inspiration for new, experienced and lapsed sketchers alike.

Pete Scully has been a correspondent for the global sketching phenomenon Urban Sketchers since 2008. A prolific artist, he gives talks about Urban Sketching across the United States, and his sketches have been featured in multiple books and exhibitions. He lives in California and is the author of four books.