Reading Notes: Zen of Drawing

Continuing a "Reading Notes" series on this blog to share some of the things I read.
One of the facets of my reading life is reading "eye candy" books - these are books that get to look at images - and not necessarily read all the text. Some of these books I stumble upon myself, and some are recommended to me directly or indirectly. A book I wanted to tell about was mentioned by an artist I admire and it was described as a "when I am in a rut I open this book and all of a sudden my enthusiasm is back and I am eager to draw". This description made me very curious and I got to the library right away. 

The book is Zen of Drawing (Drawing What You See) by Peter Parr. 

Many books in the field of sketching are lessons in sketching illustrated by collections of works of multiple artists. This book also goes through a whole bunch of "ideas of what to learn and how to use it". From tools of the trade to an interesting approach to describing a vocabulary of movements and marks one makes when drawing and how to apply them. However, this book represents the works of one artist only - through many years of sketching (25-30 years I think) and covers many media that this artist is using throughout all the years. It is a celebration of doing many different things and not sticking to one "tried and true" medium. We follow works in graphite, colored pencils, direct watercolor, ink brushes, mixed media,  and drawing on an iPad. It is a retrospective - and I enjoyed looking at it as such and tracing changes that happened with time as well as parallels of the same voice - in different mediums, through series and experiments. 

If you have a book - or several - that bring your enthusiasm back - I would love to know - as always, both comment and email work :)