Strokes of Genius 3 - The Best of Drawing

You’ll Love this Best Of Drawing Book If:

• You love finding inspiration from the work of fellow artists
• You want to hear from top artists & illustrators as they discuss their process
• You love seeing art from artists working in pencil, charcoal, ink, colored pencil, scratchboard and mixed media

In Strokes of Genius 3 – The Best of Drawing you’ll discover a brilliant collection of drawings & illustrations from 95 top contemporary artists. You’ll hear from each artist as they discuss their process, their inspirations & their approach to art. Each piece is unique, covering a wide range of subjects such as city architecture, portraits of beloved dogs, flowers, still life, portraits & breezy coastal scenes. The Strokes of Genius series includes Strokes of Genius 4 and celebrates art & top professional & amateur artists.

In Strokes of Genius 3 You’ll Find

• 140 world-class drawings, from simple, direct sketches to meticulously layered works of art selected from thousands of submissions
• An exciting mix of styles, mediums and techniques, presented in subject-specific chapters: Town & Country, Portraits, Pets, Still Life, The Human Figure and Wildlife
• Artists’ commentary on the concepts and techniques behind each piece

The theme of this edition of Strokes of Genius is “Fresh Perspective” – as part of this exciting theme we asked featured artists to complete the phrase, “Drawing is _____.” Here are a few of their responses:

"Drawing is a moment of poetry."
"Drawing is to art what physics is to science."
"Drawing is art stripped to its bare bones."

Hear From One of Our Featured Artists

This plein air sketch is one in a series of quick three-to-five hour, on-site studies that I regularly do. The technique is simple: cover sturdy archival paper with white oil pastel as a sealer and color base. Then apply rapid layers of oil pastel to create broad, blended painterly images, using a sof graphite pencil to draw in the finer linear details. This adds more tonal shades (darks) in the process as the pencil blends with the oil pastel. I use a single-edged razor blade to carve out more delicate highlights and tonal tints (lights), occasionally scraping down to the white oil pastel base to retrieve treasured whites. This process is relatively quick, clean, inexpensive and very forgiving. In case of disaster, I scrape off to the white base and try again. As I matured in this technique, successful understudies soon became income-producing pieces."-Susan Price