Draw Some Awesome product reviews

This is the book I have been waiting for all my life. Ever since I could hold a crayon, I have been convinced that I do not have one shred of artistic talent, at least not in the graphic area. My handwriting was dismal enough, but at least it served a purpose. Diagrams were just adequate. But any kind of freestyle artwork was a total disaster. Its one purpose appeared to be to make people laugh at me. I gave up trying - I can do without that sort of negativity!

But finally, Donovan Bixley has broken through the years of feeling inadequate with his simple message of positivity - "Drawing is just dreaming with a pencil in your hand". He goes on to name all sorts of creative people - Mozart for example - who channelled their creativity in different directions. The emphasis is on the process, which includes making mistakes along the way so that you learn. There is no right or wrong way. Doodling and experimentation are the key! And what makes the book even more attractive, especially for younger budding artists, is the way he has included a cartoon of himself in many of the pages, echoing the modern educational trend to side coach learners rather than instructing them as an authority figure. This is a great technique for hooking in the hesitant.

With these messages in mind, I set out to work through some of the exercises in the book. My partner and an assortment of children joined me, each armed with blank paper, pencils, crayons, chalks, and felts. There were no rules; just have a go! And we did. Instead of putting down one another's efforts or praising a drawing that we might have once considered better than the rest, we looked at the process and talked about the steps we had taken. It was an anything-goes session which involved plenty of coffee (for the adults) and smoothies (for the children) to keep us going.

What came out of our self-directed lesson was a new awareness of the many ways of communicating through graphics. One of the children was fascinated by the way a character's expression can show their mood. It would be something as small as the angle of an eyebrow or the turn of the head. Another wanted to experiment with ovals to draw different creatures. The dinosaur was a favourite! My partner was intrigued by the shapes used as a design base: one page includes images of Mickey Mouse, Bart Simpson, and SpongeBob SquarePants, all recognisable purely through their outlines. Mickey is based on circles, Bart on oblongs, and SpongeBob on squares. And a simple mushroom shape morphs into a "kilt-wearing punk with a robot arm".

The lesson all of us took from this book was that drawing is not something you do to impress other people. You do it to satisfy your own imaginings, and it can go in two directions. One is the path that Bixley himself has followed as an established artist and storyteller. The other is the springboard to all sorts of other creative possibilities. It may be music, or working with fabric, or architecture. For me it is the writing itself; doodling and jotting down sketches and diagrams which build on a basic idea are just thinking with a pencil rather than in abstract. We proved, too, that this is not a book for children. It is a book for anyone, irrespective of age, who enjoys learning something new while increasing their trust in their own abilities.

Donovan Bixley is a well known New Zealand Author and Illustrator who I first heard about a while ago when there was a competition in the upstart magazine to design a character for his Flying Furballs book series and if you won your character would feature in the book he was working on at the time which I thought was very cool giving people an opportunity like that. I have since found out that he has over 120 books and his art style is easily distinguishable that it is his and it is really fantastic, colorful, and suits the stories very well.

The Draw some awesome book is awesome to see how he comes up with his designs and the process he uses to flush out a drawing and create it. The book is packed full of Donovan's humor which is great to keep people interested and his personality shines through in this book because you can just feel he has put in a lot of effort and can tell this is truly his passion. This book caters to anyone beginning to want to learn to draw to even experienced people. He breaks down a lot of the content to make it easily understandable for kids which is marvelous and so helpful. It is such an inspirational book and I can see upcoming artists and authors that will have benefited from this book to get them to where they will be and molding their own style also.

This is a wonderful book and my children absolutely love it to bits and sit down to practice drawing with it and it is cool to see their progress already in this short time with them now doing shading and going into more detail than before with their drawings. I highly recommend this book for anyone with children as this will get their creativity flowing and flourishing or even anyone that is into drawing then this is a must-have.