Star Wars [With Stencils]

I gave this book to my 9 year old grandson, who loves to draw Star Wars figures. The text is quite a bit above his reading level, but he's already been using the book to draw!! He loves this book.

This is my favorite Star Wars book since "The Ultimate Visual Guide" came out a year or so ago. The books is a good introduction to drawing, and even provides helpful suggestions about different tools professional artists use to make their work look so great. I'm a novice drawer myself, but that's ok because the book can be used by artists of all levels who want to draw better Star Wars works of art. It gives you basic advice about how to draw the human figure, and, once you are ready, more advanced suggestions to really give your work a professional, comic-book quality look. I'm really looking forward to using this book, along with the Visual Dictionary series from DK to start drawing Star Wars again, and drawing Star Wars better than ever. In my experience, everything from DK is top notch, especially their Star Wars series. You seriously can't go wrong, the quality of work they put into their products is simply amazing.

I am very impressed with the quality of the art and instruction. Busch and Hodges have very different styles and it is fun seeing how they start and where they end. I have already started to follow the stylings and have found it almost easy to draw characters I never imagined I could. This is a book but where you can learn to draw just about any character based on the process. Burton has also done a great job in the detailed writing. She writes simply enough so that children can enjoy the book but adult enough that any age group will feel like this book is for them. I feel comfortable in showing this book to anyone who wants to learn how to draw. At the price I paid, I feel like I owe the team money.

I usually look to DK books for their outstanding visual guide books for movies and comics but here's something that Star Wars fans should dig even if they're not aspiring artists, It's the You Can Draw Star Wars book. The book features three chapters: Pencil Drawing, Inking and coloring, and finally creating a comic. You can see that based upon these chapter titles, this is a book that is geared towards aspiring comic artists, particularly. There's really good advice here even if you're not interested in drawing Star Wars characters. The book discusses the various tools the artist will using including types of pencils, compass, erasers, templates, French curves, and more. The book begins with standard drawing technique such as starting a figure out with a rough stick figure to nail down the figures pose. Throughout the book, tracing paper overlays show a figure as it is developed from stick figure to finished product which is a nice tough and quite educational, especially for beginning artists. Next you get into defining your character even more by adding muscle, shading, and movement. Now develop your drawing further by adding lighting techniques and perspective. Next up are close-ups of your character and time to work on facial features and expressions. Of course, as the books goes on you won't just be learning how to draw the human characters but also the various Star Wars aliens, druids, weapons, vehicles, and ships. The inking chapter again discusses the tools and this may be very new to younger artists who have been only working in pencil so far and have not used professional inks and colors on their work. There are of course many options when it comes to colors from markers and pencils to water color and oil paints. Again you'll learn proper inking techniques and choosing the best color properties. Finally you'll get a quick lesson in comic book design and working from a script and laying out the look of the book and adding word balloons and sound effects. The book comes with an excellent template for adding various types of balloons. It's really a well-done book that is useful for novices. The art in the book is provided by Matt Busch and Tom Hodges. Reviewed by Tim Janson