Very helpful! ( )

I'll talk mainly about how this book differs from similar "how to draw landscape" books. Hamm starts off with musings on the role of the artist as a creator (rather than as a wishy-washy xerox machine). It's tough love. He also says he's an advocate of the small sketch, because students often quickly get lost on larger canvases/sketchpads. He then discusses the path of the eye (how one assesses an illustration), and stresses the importance of the entering point (where the eye first starts assessing/dissecting the illustration) and also talks about "delayed comprehension" (pg. 17), the "take-up" line (pg. 27), and so forth. Later, the book turns into a fairly standard instructional tome. One of the best exercises is "Twenty drawings of the same tree" (pg. 52-53), and a discussion of how to draw cloud puffs in corners of main cloud blobs rather than on the edges of the main blobs (pg. 75). So yeah, there's a lot going on in this slim black & white book. Advanced artists will benefit from the philosophical aspects, while younger ones will benefit from the array of how-to exercises covering mountains, waterfalls, trees, houses, clouds, reflections, etc. As the cover points out: "More than 900 diagrams, pictorial explanations and pictures" are packed into these 199 pages. I will definitely look for a book by this author that only focuses on the "creator's responsibility" aspects that he espouses so much. ( )