62 books
Patrick Bringley
Bringley was working a desk job at The New Yorker when his older brother Tom died of cancer in his twenties. After that, he had no taste for a career; he only wanted to stand still. So he took a…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Huw Lewis-Jones put this together for the 300th birthday of Robinson Crusoe. The setup is simple: He handed a bunch of illustrators from all over the world the same assignment Defoe gave himself — you washed up somewhere, now draw…
Annie Montgomery Labatt
Annie Labatt taught art history at Texas, did a Rome Prize and a stint at the Met, and between 2013 and 2015 she gave twenty Friday-night lectures at the San Antonio Museum of Art. This book is those talks. One…
Marilyn Stokstad and Michael W. Cothren
This is the survey doorstop, the one that gets assigned. Marilyn Stokstad wrote the first edition in the nineties at Kansas, and she did something the old standbys hadn’t: She quit treating art history as a straight line from Greece…
Lisa Phillips
In 1995, the Whitney Museum of American Art hung a show arguing that the Beats weren’t just a few novelists and a poem — they were a whole visual and cultural movement; this is the catalog for that show. The…
Taria Dawson
Dawson runs the Urban Sketching World blog and a YouTube channel out of Johannesburg, and she teaches this the way she talks — relaxed, minimal supplies, no gatekeeping. The lessons build: Individual objects, then food on a table, then a…
Felix Scheinberger
Felix Scheinberger has drawn more than fifty children’s books, and he wrote this to get people over the fear of the blank page. His stance is that a sketchbook belongs to you and nobody else, so there’s no wrong way…
Jeremy Collins
Collins was shivering in a cave under Fitz Roy in Patagonia when he got the idea: Go out from home in each of the four directions, climb something new, and fill sketchbooks doing it. He told his friend and mentor…
Ekkehart Malotki
Almost everybody looking at rock art goes hunting for the pictures — the sheep, the hunters, the spirals with a story attached. (It’s the reason I drive past Mojave scratches to get to Colorado Plateau galleries.) Malotki and Dissanayake point…
Jeremy Collins
Jer Collins is a climber and an illustrator and somebody asked him to bring his sketchbook down the Amazon and draw the people living along it. That trip opened the door to mixed-media storytelling, and he kept going — the…
Philip L. Fradkin
In November 1934, a twenty-year-old kid from Los Angeles rode two burros into Davis Gulch on the Escalante and never came out. The burros were found penned in the canyon. He wasn’t. He’d been wandering the Southwest since he was…
Huw Lewis-Jones; Kari Herbert
Before cameras, if you wanted to bring back what you saw, you drew it. Married couple Lewis-Jones and Herbert — he’s a polar guide and historian, she’s the daughter of the explorer Wally Herbert — pulled together seventy sketchbooks kept…
Alex Patterson
Alex Patterson flew P-51s in the war, spent a career at IBM, retired, then went back to school and made himself an anthropologist. This came out of that second life, in 1992, and it’s still the standard — seventeen printings,…
Helen Birch
Two hundred-plus drawings by working artists, mostly people Birch found online, each one printed with a short note on how it was done. Ball-point pen on found paper. Crosshatching with a dip pen. Gouache over a photocopy. Colored ink on…
Hayden Herrera
Herrera published this in 1983, when Kahlo was still mostly filed as Diego Rivera’s wife, and it’s the book that ended that. She goes back to the blue house in Coyoacán where Frida was born, the polio at six, and…
Michel Pastoureau
Green was hard to make and harder to keep. The dye wouldn’t hold — it faded, it shifted, it wouldn’t sit still on cloth — and medieval guilds kept the blue dyers and the yellow dyers separate by law, so…
John Muir Laws and Emilie Lygren
The companion to Laws’s Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, and it’s built for anybody leading a group — teachers, naturalists, parents, camp staff. Forty-plus field activities with the actual instructions, timing, and prompts, all organized around three questions…
Ling Ling Huang
Enka grows up on the poor side of a walled city in Florida, gets a scholarship to an elite art school, and immediately fixes on Mathilde, the prodigy everyone else is afraid to approach. Mathilde is genuinely great and genuinely…
Junichiro Tanizaki
An essay from 1933 about what electric light did to Japanese aesthetics. Tanizaki argues that Japanese beauty was built for dimness — lacquerware designed to catch a single flame, gold leaf that only works in a dark room, the recess…
Kyra Cane
Cane is a British potter,and her perspective is that drawing and making are the same activity at different stages. Drawing isn’t how you plan a pot, it’s how you think about one — the loose sketch that finds the curve,…
Peter Turchi
Turchi’s premise is that a writer is a cartographer — you decide what to include, what scale to work at, where to put the edges, and how much blank space to leave for the reader. He runs it through actual…
Lucinda Kaukas Havenhand
A history of the American interior between roughly 1940 and 1970, and it’s about interiors rather than the famous chairs. Havenhand covers the designers who shaped how rooms looked and worked — Florence Knoll, Ray Eames, Alexander Girard, Van Day…
Robert G. Bednarik
Bednarik is a self-taught Australian researcher with more than a thousand papers and no formal degree, and he has spent his career telling the rock art field it is making things up. This is the catalog of that. Natural cracks…
Mariko Higaki
Higaki is an industrial designer at Seiko, and this teaches drawing as a way of understanding how things are made. You sketch a stapler, a chair, a shoe, a coffee grinder — and the exercises push you to look for…
Brian Kelley
Author and photographer Brian Kelley has a huge collection of U.S. national park maps and ephemera—at least twelve hundred items. He notes, “If you just have one map, it doesn’t feel as significant. But then when you start getting this…
Richard A. Rogers
Rogers is a communication scholar, and his subject isn’t what rock art meant but what we keep doing with it. Visitor centers, guidebooks, New Age tours, corporate logos, and the shaman theory all get examined as acts of appropriation, each…
Grace D. Li
Will Chen is a Chinese American art history student at Harvard who witnesses a museum heist and shortly thereafter is approached by a Chinese corporation with an offer: Fifty million dollars to steal back five bronze zodiac heads looted from…
Carl Hoffman
In 1961, Michael Rockefeller, twenty-three, son of the governor of New York, disappeared off the coast of Asmat in Dutch New Guinea while collecting art. The family said he drowned. Hoffman went and lived in Asmat villages for months, worked…
Peter Reyner Banham
Banham was the British architecture critic who took Los Angeles seriously when nobody else would, and this is what happened when he pointed the same eye at the Mojave. He drives it, camps it, and picks at his own reaction…
Michael Chabon
Josef Kavalier gets smuggled out of Prague in 1939 in a coffin with the Golem, a kind of Jewish Frankenstein’s monster, lands on his cousin Sammy Clay’s bedroom floor in Brooklyn, and the two of them invent a comic book…
Gabriel Campanario
Campanario is the Seattle Times artist who started the Urban Sketchers blog in 2007 and turned it into a worldwide network, and this 2012 book is the movement’s first big showcase. More than a hundred sketchers from thirty-odd countries, work…
Amy Tan
Amy Tan started drawing birds in 2016 and kept a nature journal for six years, and this is a facsimile of it — her ink and watercolor drawings with her handwritten notes running around them. The Northern flicker, the scrub…
Suhita Shirodkar
Shirodkar sketches out of San Jose and this is the entry point to the urban sketching handbook series, of which I have most, if not all. (I’m guilty of looking at sketching more than actually sketching). It was published about…
Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
Forty-nine British birds, every one of them in decline, from avocet to yellowhammer. Macfarlane writes each as a short essay rather than an identification entry — habits, flight, song, myth, and threat — and he varies the form wildly, including…
Rick Rubin
People went bananas over this book, but I’m not one of them. Rubin has produced records for Johnny Cash, the Beastie Boys, Slayer, and Adele, and he does not play an instrument or work a board. What he does is…
Anaïs Nin
Set in Paris, 1931 to 1934. Nin is in her late twenties, married to a banker, in analysis, and just beginning to write, and the diary is her real work. This is the volume where she meets Henry Miller and…
Frida Kahlo
This is last ten years of her life in her own hand — a facsimile of the journal she kept from about 1944, reproduced in full color, so you can see the actual pages. There are watercolor and ink drawings,…
George Hlavacs
Hlavics argues that sketching is a set of decisions, not a talent. He breaks it into a small number of things you’re actually choosing — line weight, edge, value, what to include — and shows how varying just those changes…
Donna Tartt
Theo Decker is thirteen when a bomb goes off in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, killing his mother, and in the smoke a dying old man tells him to take a small Dutch painting off the wall. He does, and…
Carl Hoffman
Two men, thirty years apart. Bruno Manser, a Swiss shepherd who walked into the Sarawak rainforest in 1984, lived six years with the nomadic Penan, then led their blockades against the logging companies and became a wanted man before vanishing…
Joshua M. Powell
Not a guidebook. Powell hiked the PCT and made a visual compendium of it — hand-drawn maps, charts, and diagrams covering the whole 2,650 miles from Campo to Manning Park. Elevation profiles, snowpack, water sources, the mileage between resupply towns,…
Peter Heller
Jim Stegner is a painter with a real market, two dead marriages, a daughter who was murdered, and a prison term for shooting a man in a bar. He’s living in Colorado trying to fish and paint and stay level.…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Facsimile pages from the private logbooks and sketchbooks of people at sea across four centuries. Naval officers, whalers, a ship’s surgeon, naturalists, a young woman on an emigrant voyage, modern sailors and marine biologists. Watercolors of coastlines drawn as navigational…
Kassia St. Clair
Seventy-five colors, two or three pages each, and every one has a story with a twist. Mummy brown was made from actual ground-up mummies, and Victorian painters kept buying it until they found out. Scheele’s green was arsenic and it…
Stephanie Bower
Bower trained as an architect and taught architectural drawing, and this is the tips volume — a hundred and one short entries you can flip to quickly. How to find eye level and why everything depends on it, how to…
Gabriel Campanario
This is the buildings volume and the one that fixes the most common glitch. It’s all about perspective, finding eye level, one and two vanishing points, how to draw a street that runs uphill, how to fake a crowd of…
Mike Yoshiaki Daikubara
Everybody draws the lines and then fills them in. Daikubara does it backwards — watercolor down first, loose and fast, shapes and values with no outline, then ink on top once it’s dry, and only where it’s needed. The advantage…
Róisín Curé
People are the thing that stops most sketchers cold. They move, and everybody already knows what a person is supposed to look like, so the errors show. Curé’s fix is to start with proportion and then get you drawing fast…
Veronica Lawlor
Lawlor drew the aftermath of September 11 on the streets of Manhattan, and this is the volume about drawing as journalism — going to the event and reporting it in line. Courtrooms, protests, disaster zones, political conventions, ordinary meetings. She…
Virginia Hein and Gail L. Wong
The volume about sketching the parts of a scene that won’t hold still and don’t have straight lines. Hein and Wong work through trees as masses rather than leaves, foliage in different seasons, water and reflections, rock and cliff, skies…
Katie Woodward
Light is what makes a sketch read, and this is the volume about it. Woodward works through value structure first — squinting to reduce a scene to three or four tones — then the direction and quality of light, cast…
Shari Blaukopf
Blaukopf teaches in Montreal and sketches a lot of wet streets and bare trees, and this is the color volume of the handbook series. It’s pocket-sized and built around one idea: A tiny palette, mixed well, beats a big box…
Stephanie Bower
Less a how-to than a survey of where the movement went. Urban Sketchers started as a Flickr group in 2007 and turned into a global thing with chapters in hundreds of cities, and Bower gathers work from sketchers across those…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Maps of places that don’t exist and essays by the writers who made them. Treasure Island, Middle-earth, Narnia, Earthsea, Winnie-the-Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood, Discworld, and plenty more, reproduced large. Philip Pullman, Robert Macfarlane, Frances Hardinge, Cressida Cowell, David Mitchell, Joanne…
Rosalie Haizlett
With luck, Tiny Worlds will trigger FOMO—and point you toward the miraculous web of beauty seen at foot level and strolling speed. Plagued by chronic migraines as a teenager, West Virginia watercolorist Rosalie Haizlett started taking long walks in nature…
Gabrielle Zevin
Sam and Sadie meet as kids in a hospital game room in Los Angeles, fall out, and meet again in a Cambridge subway station in the nineties. They make a video game together in a borrowed apartment over one summer…
Kory Stamper
Kory Stamper spent decades writing dictionaries at Merriam-Webster, and she kept getting stuck on the color entries in Webster’s Third, which are gloriously nuts. Begonia is defined as a deep pink that’s bluer than fiesta and stronger than sweet william.…
Franny Moyle
J.M.W. Turner was the son of a Covent Garden barber, sold his first drawings out of the shop window, got into the Royal Academy at fourteen, and became the most radical painter in England — and stayed a rough, secretive,…
Isabel Carmona Andreu
Confession: I have an absurdly large collection of urban sketching books and spend more time admiring their artwork than actually drawing. That’s okay. This is a beginner’s book, and right up my alley. Andreu sketches around Newbury in England and…
Felix Scheinberger
Scheinberger’s watercolor book, and it’s aimed at people who’ve been told watercolor is difficult and precious. He isn’t. It’s color theory taught quickly, a small palette, the mechanics of wet-on-wet and glazing, how to keep whites, how to fix a…
Patrick Syme
Before color charts, naturalists had no shared vocabulary, so a German mineralogist named Abraham Werner built one and the Scottish painter Patrick Syme expanded it in 1814 — 110 colors, each with a hand-painted swatch and three references: A mineral,…
Patti Smith
Patti Smith wrote this in her forties, a short book about being a child in southern New Jersey — the fields behind the house, the woolgatherers she imagined moving through them at dusk, a slaughterhouse, a cloud museum, her brother…
