Color Drawing by Michael E. Doyle (1980, Book, Illustrated)

Much to my happy surprise, I got a super bargain on a winner with "Color Drawing: A Marker and Colored Pencil Approach for Architects, Landscape Architects, Interior and Graphic Designers, and Artists," by Michael Doyle.

That title is a mouthful and if you see it at auction it may only have the first two words. Or get cut off at "Arc" the way mine was. I took a chance on it cheap and when it came, my jaw dropped. The cover's a little fun with a row of townhouses whimsically rendered in bright candy colors on black. The interior is a sophisticated textbook for commercial art -- it seems like it may have been written to be used in a design college.

The styles are very realistic and the author makes one stunning point about architecture that I never realized -- the absence of color and detail in modern architecture in the sixties and its explosion in the 1980s may have a lot to do with the invention of color markers! A lot of those grim boxy gray buildings may have been designed by artists who only had grayscale to work with and didn't learn to draw well.

The marker-colored pencil method is fast and powerful. The examples are vivid and realistic and you can find just about anything you want to draw in architecture or exteriors or interiors. You can learn to render cars with this book, or houses, or churches, landscapes in any season, foliage, it's all here. I had a big gap in my how to draw books on anything that taught how to render houses and buildings in an appealing, realistic way -- and this book covers exactly that. Not only is the primary technique effective, the lessons go into design and how to render architecture beautifully in pretty much any medium. I'd have no problem adapting this to doing an oil painting of a house or scratchboard or anything.

It's a great book for learning about color and color theory in depth too. If you have problems with color in your art, this book may be the one that opens it up for you. Much of that was familiar to me but I found it well presented in a format that makes it easy to experiment. I'm all set to try to do a good rendering of my own house now that I've read it.