If you want to improve your sketching and want a different outlook, this book will certainly focus your drawing and show another side of everyday items, adverts engineering and sharing your work.
It is an interesting concept.

I thought that this was geared towards artists, but it's going more into the design/engineering direction of drawings.
I wasn't really sure what the book wanted to be. It's not really instructional, but also not a coffee table book. It also felt quite short and strangely organized. First some interviews with examples and then drawings from the author.

I really enjoyed this observational sketching book. I liked the different styles of the different sketchers and the deep research about how each ordinary piece that they sketched is actually manufactured. The book has a simple but relatively comprehensive tutorial on how to sketch basic objects, focusing on perspective, shapes and breaking things down. It then proceeds to give examples of sketches done for each simple object from multiple perspectives.

It's not really an instructional book and it's not pure eye candy either. I'd say it sits somewhere in the middle. There is a lot of detail in each sketch, showing the smallest pieces of each item.

If you're interested in sketching, especially everyday ordinary objects, you will like this one.

with gratitude to netgalley and Quarto Publishing Group for an early copy in exchange for an honest review.

Observational Sketching: How to Draw Almost Any Object is a tutorial art & technique guide by Mariko Higaki. Originally released in Japanese in 2019, this English translation from Quarto on their Rockport imprint is due out 7th Jan 2020. It's 128 pages and will be available in paperback format.

The style is technical, almost isometric (see cover). The author includes a number of short essays from other technical artists and engineers on various aspects of observational sketching such as product design and packaging design. I found the design process very interesting and enlightening. These include a Q&A format on the artistic process, the artists development and careers, and other information about how to actually get what one sees onto the paper in a recognizable form.

The chapters are arranged thematically: What observational sketching is (and what's the appeal), basic tutorials and techniques which anyone can use right away, how to observe and render different surfaces (such as metals, plastics, etc), and the step by step specific tutorials.

I find the style very appealing (then again, I'm an engineer and pretty much anything I need to draw on a daily basis -needs- to be pared down and technical). I found a number of really good tips for rendering drawings which actually look like what I'm aiming for.

Lots of worthwhile tutorial information here.

Four stars.

I received an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review via netgalley and the publishers.

This book is fantastically detailed all the way through and gives fantastic step by step instructions as well as tips.
I loved how it introduced the artists and gave information about each of them at the beginning.
I cant wait to have a go at afew of these sketches.

This book was not what I expected but I found it very interesting. It would be ideal for engineering, architecture and other subjects where technical drawing is important. It is still brilliant for artists too as it encourages you to slow down and look more carefully at objects, to really see them. To consider the material they are made of, their life span, and how they are put together. I was intrigued by the detail of the sketches. It is not really a book for beginners learning to draw, but it would definitely be useful for any level of artist learning to observe better.

I can't give a star rating to this book as I seem to have been given an ARC that's quite unfinished. Entire pages are blank. Others have sketches and lines where I assume text will go. I am guessing that this needed to be translated and much of that is not done. THAT SAID, the illustrations seem to be finished and those are quite technical. This is clearly a book for advanced artists looking to hone their technique, not beginning sketchers. Higaki's finished sketches are impressive. Simple objects like a jar of Vaseline are perfectly drawn with great detail. He seems to go over the basics about things like perspective and he also apparently asks questions like to consider the materials of the object (without the text, all I can see is this command in bold and no discussion or instruction).

Very detailed examples are given of ordinary objects he has drawn with great detail (a LEGO minifigure, a leather couch, a beauty product, a pair of sunglasses, a label maker...). These almost look like architectural plans, and some sketches show things as if they were taken apart in order to understand how to draw them better. Again, without text it's hard to know context.

NetGalley and the publisher provided a temporary digital ARC for the purpose of review.