On Drawing Trees and Nature: A Classic Victorian Manual (Dover Art Instruction)

If you like to know why and how a tree is drawn than this is a great book. These trees are drawn expertly.I actually enjoy reading the many words on how to properly shade foliage.

This book, though dated by some 100 years or so, is still an excellent guide to drawing trees and foliage. I happen to love the style of 19th century landscape paintings and drawings and wanted to incorporate that style into my own work. The "how did they do that?" questions were answered perfectly by this book.The writing style is antiquated (no one talks or writes like this anymore--a pity), though I think that people from this era were better able to express themselves than people today. You don't need to read every word to get the gist of what's going on or to understand the techniques expressed here. Just look at the pictures and copy them until you get the feel for it.Highly recommended if you like the 19th century style.

OK. This is coming from someone who has studied Shakespeare and still needs to use the foot notes to understand a lot of the Shakespearian expressions. Unfortunately, there are no such footnotes for this book. The book was written by a person born in 1798 and in the mid 1800's wrote what may be the very first "How to Draw Book". The people in those days depended a lot on reading for entertainment. They wanted books to last and last. Think of Dickens: words,words, words to get to the point. I am thinking I would like to re-write this book in concise, and modern day language for my own use and edification. Yes, the book does have morsels of wonderful advice on drawing trees. I have not read the entire book at this time, since I just received it yesterday. I have mainly read the chapter on follage, skipping the wordy introduction and beginning chapters since I am most eager to get to the heart of the matter, but the dear author of this book took soooooo long to get to the heart. With each morsel of good advice, the reader must endure a wordy and often times unnecessary and repetitiv explanation. The impatient reader will say, "I get the point, now get on with it". Yet, the dialog is quaint and amusing at times, and is also sincere and quite intelligent. I reccommend this book to artists who are patient enough to search out the jewels of advice within these pages. Oh! I just love it that he calls tree trunks, "stems".

I have many drawing and sketching how-to books and have been actively working for 25 years. This is, by far, the very best instructional book of all.

J.D. Harding was one of John Ruskin's drawing masters, and the advice he imparts in this volume is priceless. In the age of brief text messages and tweets, some readers may be put off by his ornate Victorian writing style. Don't despair! Untangling the thicket of words is worth the effort if you are a lover of representational drawing. I have been a professor of drawing at the university level for nearly a quarter of a century and this is one of the best drawings manuals I have ever come across. Be warned, however; this is NOT a volume of facile tricks and techniques to help you make pretty pictures. This is serious advice for those who want to learn to SEE with a pencil in their hand.

The price was just right, the book was in excellent condition. Arrived very quickly.

This is a great book outlining how to go about landscape drawing (which can lead to landscape painting). Don't be put off by the arcane language style since it was written in the 1800's. It is filled with meaningful observations and leads the student from learning how to see, how to use materials and how to capture the character of the elements of the landscape, better than any modern instructional book I have ever come across. Great reproductions and examples of good and bad rendering. If you are interested in landscape painting, you can't find anything better to begin with than this book.

If there were a preview of the print version, I have no doubt it would be more popular and have more reviews. A chance to see some of the full-page plates would make clear the value of the book.It is true that this "classic Victorian manual" is written in a style most of us have little exposure to, filled as it is with complex chains of subordination, and strings of parataxis when the author gets excited. In addition to the unfamiliar style, the author also does not hesitate to inject strongly worded commentary on morals and taste, such as this excoriation of examples from two plates: "In neither of them is there the least evidence of thought; the one displays rashness, the other inanity. At first sight, one of them may please by a semblance of power; but it is a power of the fingers, not of the mind; it is dexterity without truth or judgement; it is power misapplied. The other has not even this low recommendation; the only idea that it forcibly impresses on the mind is that of time wasted. As a production of Art it is purposeless, idealess, and powerless. There is neither distinct form nor character in any one object it contains. The only utility of such examples consists in their exhibition of a collection of errors and deformities to be avoided." This, in the middle of the chapter on foliage.Further, the somewhat digressive nature of the discussion means the example plates may be several pages away from important discussion of technique. I've gone through my book and added margin notes to the plates so I can find the sections of text that go with them. It is also important to note which plates have negative examples (I use a check for positive, an 'x' for negative), since this may not always be immediately apparent, at least if you're not already a pencil technique expert.All of these difficulties are worth it for the plates. Harding has an amazing ability to convey the impression of sunlight in his pencil drawings that is rarely seen in instructional material. In addition, the 23 plates taken from another of his books, "Lessons on Trees," though stripped of the spare text of the original book, are an amazing education by themselves, and frankly worth the cost of the entire book. These were created in a teaching tradition that put great value on copying (at least early) — there's an entire chapter on copying. Every medium has its peculiar ways to solve certain problems, which attentive copying provides instruction in. So, sit down with these plates, and copy until you can get that sense of sunlight Harding does so well. The early plates have four examples a page (bare trunks and branches), then two examples of fuller trees, and finally single-plate subjects of full scenes.Dover has printed this book on somewhat heavier glossy paper, which allows the detail of the plates to come through. It also lays flat for most of the book, though I sort of wish the extra plates from "Lessons on Trees" had been shoved into the center of the book, instead of at the end, so I could leave the book open without help. My only complaint is that some of the plates are rather washed out, losing some of the detail in the lighter values.

Sou fa desse artista de longa data

Detailed manual

Really lovely book, beautiful illustrations - new and beautifully presented.

This is an excellent book for learning to draw trees.

Love both the Harding books -learned from them and copied a lot of drawings from them as exercise work - they are both up there in the "top ten" essential drawing books along with Dodson' "Keys to drawing", Harold Speed's book, etc. Many thanks to Armand Cabrera for recommending them in the comments on Gurney Journey!