Author Michael Seary has written a how-to-draw book with instructions on how to produce a reasonable likeness of an object. He calls this art and the draftspeople who draw in this manner, artists. Seary doesn’t claim to provide enticement to draw: his book is a list of rules and basic drawing exercises. His credentials include 35 years of grade school art class teaching and it shows, especially with his constant admonishments to practice (including, but not limited to, seven times in the six short paragraphs of the introduction). He also doesn’t abide any messing around with whatever materials are available, insisting instead that his students use the proper materials. It brings to mind rows of students, shirts buttoned to their collars, sketching to a metronome. While most would agree that learning the basics is good grounding for learning to draw, I would have felt better about this book if it showed the incredibly creative things that happen when the rules are broken, showing kids that there is more than one way to approach their blank canvas, and promoting lateral thinking.

Seary attempts to teach all facets of drawing, only lightly scratching the surface of his topics. In “Creating Tension,” he explains in three paragraphs what tension feels like, then ends with, “Artists like to create tension in their paintings, too, by arranging colors, shapes and lines in a certain way,” without explaining what this certain way is. The reality is that Seary prefers no tensions in his pupils’ drawings. His many rules, such as the one for a balanced composition, attest to it: “Imagine that there is a little seesaw under it.” Seary falls back on old-style methods for achieving a likeness, including reducing the objects to geometric shapes and drawing an egg-shaped head and dividing it into sections for a portrait. Michel Bisson’s illustrations have a get-the-job-done art director’s style about them rather than the feeling of an inspired illustrator, although this may be due to his trying to draw like a beginner in order not to intimidate. Also disappointing is the lack of colour in an art book – only 10 of 64 pages.