How to Draw What You See

Book excerpt: The 35th anniversary edition of the classic how-to book that has helped millions of artists learn to draw. When it was originally published in 1970, How to Draw What You See zoomed to the top of Watson-Guptill’s best-seller list—and it has remained there ever since. “I believe that you must be able to draw things as you see them—realistically,” wrote Rudy de Reyna in his introduction. Today, generations of artists have learned to draw what they see, to truly capture the world around them, using de Reyna’s methods. How to Draw What You See shows artists how to recognize the basic shape of an object—cube, cylinder, cone, or sphere—and use that shape to draw the object, no matter how much detail it contains.