REVIEW: "How to Draw" books by Amit Offir

Review of Amit Offir's How to Draw Gnomes and Dwarves

***I was given a free PDF copy of "How to Draw-Gnomes & Dwarves" by Amit Offir in exchange of my honest opinion of this drawing book. I have received no other financial gains to do so nor will I in the future from linking to his site. I merely want to share with you my opinions of this book and grant you easy access to his site if you so choose to have a look***

Source

I am a huge believer in the benefits of creative expression through art. No matter what age you are or what medium you use, there is something very magical about taking a blank canvas and painting a beautiful picture; or in this case a blank paper to create a cute character.

This book (I assume all his others are written in the same manner) is illustrated in step by step easy directions. It is full of simple, cute characters that you can easily make come to life on your page even if you have little to no drawing experience, so long as you are willing to try. This book is meant to give you the fundamental basics of drawing characters to build your own self confidence. Using these easy step by step directions, in time you will develop a sense of accomplishment with your drawing abilities and then you will be more likely to make alterations and create your own characters.

I consider myself as a jack of all trades, master of none. I have never explored cartooning. My drawings tend to be more realistic and certainly almost always contain animals. People are difficult, even in cartoons. Learning proportions is probably one of the hardest things to master. Faces and hands are one of the things I find most difficult to try. The How to Draw blog has an article on proportions for figure drawings which also gives you a step by step sample of what you can expect to see in these books.

This step by step book, even on my first try of cartooning was easy to follow.

This first picture took 5 steps to create (there are 12 steps in total).

Picture two contains another three steps.

 This third picture contains three more steps.

 Now all that is left is to colour your picture in as the final twelfth step.

 Not bad for a first attempt :)

My second drawing was a gnome carrying an acorn and was a side view. Picture one was a total of six steps. I didn't have mine bent over enough as my gnome ended up looking more like he was standing straight up than like he was carrying a heavy acorn.

The next pictures contains the next twelve steps.

The final step is colouring your drawing in. I used coloured pencils this time as I didn't really like how the markers turned out. This book does not dicuss shading at all but I like to add some depth with a little bit of shading. Perhaps that takes away from the cartoon effect but it feels more natural to me.

 The tree was probably my favourite thing to draw in this book, with the mushrooms being a close second. Since I typically shy away from "people" I guess that makes a lot of sense.

7 steps in this picture

3 more steps in this picture

One step here

The last step before adding colour

Adding some colour

Finished tree

My tree looks like it's straight out of 100 acre woods! I can only imagine which gnome family might live there if not Winnie the Pooh himself.

 The mushrooms were by far the most fun to draw and after being fortunate enough to stumble upon these beauties in real life,

I knew I needed to transform my mushroom into a Muscaria Amanita.

Not only were his mushrooms the quickest and easiest to draw but they were where I first tried adding my own details. The tallest mushroom does not contain the frill around the stem, gills or the spots in the step by step direction. 

The great thing about these books is they teach you the basic step by step technique. After you gain some self confidence in your drawing abilities it is up to you to see where your imagination takes you with your new knowledge.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand" -Albert Einstein

 So are you ready to try your hand at drawing with these easy to follow step by step "How to Draw" books? Each PDF varies in number of pages. How to Draw Gnomes and Dwarves is 29 pages and contains directions for 14 different characters, a tree and mushrooms. It costs $2.99 at the time of this review which is a very economical price if you have a budding artist at your house or even if you want to try your hand at cartooning.

There is one book available for a free download on his website if you want to sign up to receive it so you can see first hand how these books are laid out before making a purchase.

CLICK HERE to see the download freebie page

If you decide you like these books you can buy them singularly for $2.99 each,  one of 4 collections of books currently available for $9.99 or the mega collection of all 36 books for $19.99. To see the various collections available click HERE.At the top of the page there is also a link to categories where you can see all the individual titles.

You can follow How to draw on their facebook page HERE if you like. Their updates appear few and far between but it keeps you up to date on new articles as they come available.

Reviewing this book was fun to do and I hope it encourages you to give drawing cartoons a try. It really can be fun!

If you try one of these books I'd love to hear what you thought of them.

September Homeschooling...Apples, Apples, Apples

September was our first month of homeschooling... a month of learning for us all. Learning new things, in new ways with new people. I am amazed at how many homeschoolers there are nearby and and am thankful we have met so many wonderful families!

Here is a longgg recap of our first month as we jumped head first into our apple unit study (my theme based ECE training is easy to fall back upon as we all explore learning at home...it gives us a starting place and as time goes on I am sure our teaching strategies will change as we adapt our methods to suite each individual need of our children).

We start the mornings off with journal time and then do an activity (science, math, language) and or a craft. I have been doing journal entries as well to encourage the girls (I won't bore you with all my own pics I promise).

We started out the month learning about the parts of an apple.

 

 We learned there was a star inside the apple through the story about a small red house with no windows or doors and discovered the physical surprise of a star inside. Sierra was amazed! After reading the story she predicted that we would NOT find a star so when she cut it open she was completely amazed. We had to cut through a few apples so she could make sure it would reoccur over and over and was not just a fluke.

We made arm printed apple trees.

 We described apples...how they look, feel, taste and made a list of things made from apples.

We have learned about apples through poetry.

 We've learned about the lifecycle of apples from seed, to sprout, to tree, to bud, to blossom, to apple and around to a seed again.

 We've played math games... Sierra did some as well but an older version then these I just missed the pics :(

printable HERE

This printable I had saved...it is not mine and I am not sure where it came from as there is no copyright notice on it.

 

Both girls LOVED sorting skittles by colour, stacking them in their baskets and then counting them...before eating them of course! As you can tell they didn`t last long. As soon as the counting was done... the skittles disappeared! I made this activity page and then realized after we opened up the skittles there are actually five colours in the bag and the purples looked more like brown. If you`d like a copy feel free to email me and I can send you a copy with the five colours.

 We measured, mixed, stirred, poured, molded and took turns to make apple rice krispie treats.

Treats for our neighbours

We made apple pancakes another day but they ended up looking more like pumpkins!

 Our favouite activities went along with the book Ten Apples up on Top by Theo LeSeig. I couldn`t find my copy of the book so we watched THIS VIDEO online.

After listening to the story we piled as many apples as we could on our characters from the story. The character colouring pages came from HERE. I just cut them off and used only the upper bodies.

 We learned what makes up 10... free 7 page printable came from HERE.

Aayla made a 10 Apples Up on Top book. This printable book (and many other ideas for this book) came from HERE.

The girls tried balancing apples on their heads.

Sierra managed to balance two apples Up on Top

Then we tried other ways of balancing...and added in some bean bags.

We played an apple toss game by drawing an appletree on the ground with five circle on it. The object of the game was to try and toss all five bean bags into a circle.

 

 We also read the book The Apple Pie Tree by Zoe Hall. We made cinnimon apple playdough. We shaped the dough into apples, then cut them, and made them into mini pies.

 

And last but not least we went for a walk and found a wild apple tree. We were supposed to go to an orchard but we ran out of time this month :(

 There were not the prettiest apples and most were spotted but they were perfect for applesauce!

Washing the apples

Aayla placing the apple on the peeler

Peeling her apple all by herself

Sierra thought this peeling-coring process was so cool

Sierra chopping the apples before putting them in the pot

She discovered breaking the coils was faster then cutting them

Into the pot with cinnamon and honey. My little helpers were kind of heavy on the cinnamon!

Mmmm homemade applesauce

 Soooo as you can see we have had a very busy first month of homeschooling...and October is looking even busier!