Here are 100 books that All My Photographs Are Made With Pens fans have personally recommended if you like
All My Photographs Are Made With Pens.
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I have been continuously studying, practicing, and/or teaching architecture since 1984, and my particular focus has been on drawing–why we draw and how we can develop our own practices for drawing, whether it’s related to architecture or not. Even more particular is my focus on drawing by hand–a practice that has had a major resurgence after the initial wave of fascination for digital drawing tools has waned. I am passionate about drawing and want to share that passion with others, partially by recommending books that have been of significant use to me over the years.
This lavishly illustrated book takes the reader around the world, visiting cities through the drawings of more than 100 artists. Along with the founding of the Urban Sketchers non-profit organization, this book helped create an enormous, global groundswell of people who draw what they see on-site using a variety of media.
The Art of Urban Sketching is both a comprehensive guide and a showcase of location drawings by artists around the world who draw the cities where they live and travel. This beautiful volume explains urban sketching within the context of a long historical tradition and how it is practiced today. It includes profiles of leading practitioners, a discussion of the benefits of working in this art form, and shows how one can participate and experience it through modern-day social networks and online activity. The book is illustrated with over 700 beautiful, contemporary illustrations, and includes artists' profiles and extended captions…
I’ve been sketching the world around me since 2014 after discovering one or two of the books on this list and feeling inspired to do the same. I have travelled and sketched my way through many countries and in 2020, started a blog called Urban Sketching World, sharing tips and tricks I have learnt along the way. This expanded to a YouTube channel called Taria’s Sketchy Adventures, and I am proud to say I have taught hundreds (possibly thousands) of people how to pick up a sketchbook and start recording their own sketchy adventures. I now have my own book published called The Beginners Guide to Urban Sketching.
I think this could have been the book that made me want to sketch the world around me. It’s difficult to pinpoint but let’s just say this book had a huge impact on me, both at the time and my life subsequently.
This a graphic memoir. I am not sure if any other books even exist like this. But Danny shares what happened to his wife one fateful day, the subsequent impact on his family, and how he dealt with it through drawing. Danny’s drawings show that one does not need to be an amazing artist to sketch the world around you. His sketches are a record of a moment in time and not something made to hang on a wall. This was a major revelation to me.
In the tradition of Persepolis, In the Shadow of No Towers, and Our Cancer Year, an illustrated memoir of remarkable depth, power, and beauty
Danny Gregory and his wife, Patti, hadn't been married long. Their baby, Jack, was ten months old; life was pretty swell. And then Patti fell under a subway train and was paralyzed from the waist down.
In a world where nothing seemed to have much meaning, Danny decided to teach himself to draw, and what he learned stunned him. Suddenly things had color again, and value. The result is Everyday Matters, his journal of discovery, recovery,…
I’ve been sketching the world around me since 2014 after discovering one or two of the books on this list and feeling inspired to do the same. I have travelled and sketched my way through many countries and in 2020, started a blog called Urban Sketching World, sharing tips and tricks I have learnt along the way. This expanded to a YouTube channel called Taria’s Sketchy Adventures, and I am proud to say I have taught hundreds (possibly thousands) of people how to pick up a sketchbook and start recording their own sketchy adventures. I now have my own book published called The Beginners Guide to Urban Sketching.
This is another book I got early on in my sketching career. I love James Hobbs's sketching style. He uses a thick black pen for the most part, and his style is simple–the perfect inspiration for a beginner.
He also includes examples of many other sketchers’ work–all of which emphasise that you do not need to have perfect drawing skills to capture the world around you. As someone who did not do very well in art at school myself, I found this book to be my permission slip to draw anyway.
I learned from this book that drawing is a way to record and understand the world in your own way, not a test on how accurately you can copy it in your sketchbook.
Breathe the air and hear the sounds, and experience the freshness and energy that working on location brings to your work...a quality that says "I was here." And transports your viewer there, too.
In Sketch Your World, top artists take you back to the scene--be it a bustling cafe, town square, or quiet park--to share the subjects that caught their eye and how they captured them on paper.
Showcases the work and approaches of more than 20 contemporary urban artists.
Covers topics such as how to hone observation skills, sketch moving subjects, and…
I’ve been sketching the world around me since 2014 after discovering one or two of the books on this list and feeling inspired to do the same. I have travelled and sketched my way through many countries and in 2020, started a blog called Urban Sketching World, sharing tips and tricks I have learnt along the way. This expanded to a YouTube channel called Taria’s Sketchy Adventures, and I am proud to say I have taught hundreds (possibly thousands) of people how to pick up a sketchbook and start recording their own sketchy adventures. I now have my own book published called The Beginners Guide to Urban Sketching.
Koosje is an incredible art educator, and I was so excited to see she had created a book. This book is super thick and juicy. She shares her sketches from her life, along with exercises and inspiration on how to do the same.
I have followed Koosje for many years, and I love her lighthearted “anyone can do it” approach to teaching and inspiring others to keep a sketchbook of their life. I often return to this book to look through Koosje’s sketches and remind myself of both the value and pure joy sketching your life can bring.
The moments of our lives are precious, but they pass so quickly. Drawing these moments—from special trips to our daily coffee—is a way to not only slow down time, but to celebrate it. Capturing in a sketchbook what we see in front of us turns the everyday into the extraordinary. And you don’t need to be born with talent to make art! Artist Koosje Koene has shown thousands of people all over the world the simple, immensely satisfying techniques that can get anyone started on a lifetime of fulfilling fun making art. You don’t need to have an art school…
I have been passionate about making, reading, and studying comics for my whole life. When I first encountered autobiographical comics, they were all by women who I looked up to for their ability to tackle their lives with both words and images. This is a small list and biased towards the cartoonists I first encountered in the world of female autobiographical comics. There is so much more out there. I love how the flexibility and history of the comic form have allowed for so much blending of genres and styles.
I owe so much to this book. Aline Kominsky-Crumb pulls her art and comics from multiple decades of her life into this huge collection, making an incredible mixed-media autobiography that captures so much of who she was. Her unfiltered honesty set the bar high for what autobiographical comics could be.
Aline Kominsky-Crumb, one of the earliest female cartoonists, presents a collection of her own highly inventive and daring artwork from over four decades, along with unusual photographs and memorabilia. The road to becoming an underground- comics legend begins with Komisky-Crumb as a nice jewish girl from Long Island, carries her to Greenwich Village in the 1960's, and to California, land of hippy cartoonists, and on to a more or less sedate life with hubby(equally legendary R. Crumb) and daughter, Sophie. Her funny/sad tales show a woman bewildered by her place in society and determined to find her own way. These…
Documentary Comics are this genre of comics in which you can make a community visible, denounce a crime or expose yourself to the world. Being able to dialogue with the world while dialoguing with the reader is amazing. The elements you have to take into account the things you can hide in the silence of a drawing, compelling the reader to read again, to find the easter egg about that thing you really want to talk about. The ways of telling the truth in drawings. All those things are the things that I love about documentary comics.
I am not recommending a particular volume or compilation. In general I love the work of Harvey Pekar. He has brought me closer to Documentary Comics than any other author. He worked with reflections and anecdotes and was one of those authors that from the writing was able to defy the common places in comics making. Yes, he was a scriptwriter, but he pulled out so many amazing comics from the graphic formula and made them work. I remember seeing gigantic balloons with blocks of text. Pages and pages of close-ups, and they weren’t boring. A comic about him reflecting on his masculinity by unclogging the toilet. Amazing.
Meet Harvey Pekar, a true American original. For over 25 years he's been writing comic books about his life, chronicling the ordinary and mundane in stories both funny and touching. Working as a hospital file clerk in Cleveland, his dead-on eye for the frustrations and minutiae of the workaday world mix in a delicate balance with his insight into personal relationships. Illustrating his stories are the cream of the underground comics world, including the legendary Robert Crumb. Pekar has been called 'the blue collar Mark Twain', and compared to Dreiser, Dostoevsky and Lenny Bruce. With American Splendor now an award-winning…
I’m an Eisner-nominated and award-winning graphic novel and comics writer, editor, and book packager. I've worked on staff at the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, Disney Publishing, DC Comics, Nickelodeon Magazine, and Platinum Studios. My sequential art book, The Bramble, won the 2013 Moonbeam Gold Medal for Picture Books, and I created a new way to read comics with BirdCatDog, a 2015 Eisner Awards nominee, that received the 2015 Moonbeam Spirit Award Gold Medal for Imagination, and was chosen by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best children’s books of 2014. SheHeWe, the third book in the series, was a 2016 Eisner Award nominee for Best Publication for Early Readers.
In his foreword, Eisner writes: “In this work, I hope to deal with the mission and process of storytelling with graphics.” Where McCloud shows you different options and tools for how to choose images to explore ideas, Eisner gets specific, and shows you how he does it. This book, along with the four others I recommend, and mine, gives you all the tools you need to choose your own path for effectively working as a writer and/or artist in the sequential art medium.
In Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, Will Eisner-one of the most influential comic artists of the twentieth century-lays out the fundamentals of storytelling and their application in the comic book and graphic novel. In a work that will prove invaluable for comic artists and filmmakers, Eisner reveals how to construct a story and the basics of crafting a visual narrative. Filled with examples from Eisner's work as well as that of artists like Art Spiegelman and R. Crumb, this essential work covers everything from the fine points of graphic storytelling to the big picture of the medium, including how to:…
I’m a cyclist and a cycling fan. I’ve commuted through the Surrey countryside by tricycle and explored the cycling city of Cambridge by bike. I’ve stood at the side of the road to cheer on the Olympic road race, the Tour de France and the Tour of Britain, and the World Road Cycling Championships. I kept on cycling until I was eight and a half months pregnant and was reading a biography of Beryl Burton when I went into labour. There aren’t a lot of cycling novels out there, but I’m proud of having added one to that small number.
I wasn’t following professional cycling in the bad old days of systematic doping, but this book made me feel like I was there—not just at the roadside, but in the peloton.
The characters—the good, the bad, and the downright repulsive, are all caught in a system that grinds down the best and brings out the worst, and I couldn’t look away. I wanted integrity to prevail, I wanted justice done, but most of all, I wanted to know what happened next.
Then there’s the prose, which is so bright and vivid that I found a new favourite line in almost every chapter. It’s compulsive, stylish, and cynical—rather like the sport itself.
'Waddington employs a cheerful surrealism to convey the superhuman status of his cyclists and the designer violence of his killer. The encounters with death are funny rather than frightening and the narrator is omnipotent, stylish and amused. Waddington's descriptions of racing, and they are many and enthralling, have the rhythm and intensity of poetry. You're riding with your wheel an inch from the author's, carried along by the surge of the pack, normal life and normal people no more than a muted clamour on the roadside. It's exhilarating stuff.' Joe Cogan in The Independent on Sunday
I have been a surrealist since I discovered Salvador Dali and David Lynch at the age of 14. I have been on a path to combine the art world’s depth in style; symbols and metaphors with storytelling. Becoming a comic artist was a natural path and the media is great for expressing the many complex questions in life; what it is to be human and a woman in this world. I have become an artist who revolves around feminism and surrealism, eros and doubt.
This comic is a 1:1 dream story. It has the weirdness and absurdity of dreams. It is about Juliet herself and is an autobiographical classic. And it made me wonder how very personal feelings in your dreams are actually universal. It also has feministic potential, being very honest with all its dreamy gender chaos and strangeness.And it’s funny.
Doucet has transcribed her intimate dreams i nto intensely drawn comic book stories, remembering everythi ng from tormenting nightmares to her most secret desires. Th e widely acclaimed young cartoonist offers us a unique psych edelic trip. '
Jean Muenchrath wrote down her story to heal herself from the trauma of a life-threatening mountaineering accident, an epic survival incident, and decades of chronic pain. She then published her memoir to inspire readers to follow their dreams and to encourage them to overcome whatever challenges their life presents. Before she became an author, Muenchrath was a park ranger with the National Park Service for over thirty years. She’s led trekking tours in Nepal and Thailand and worked in Bhutan with the World Wildlife Fund. Jean enjoys traveling to foreign lands, exploring wild places and sitting quietly in meditation.
This book is one of my all time favorite reads. Mount Analogue is a short poetic novel. Daumal’s rich descriptions and symbolism engaged my imagination and made me think deeply about the story’s meaning. The author takes readers on a journey to a mystical place with an unusual set of characters and strange circumstances. The story revolves around an adventurous sailing and climbing expedition to a mystical mountain hidden from the world’s inhabitants which is believed to link the earth to a higher sphere of reality. It’s full of intrigue and packed with pithy philosophical statements worth pondering. Daumal’s words and descriptions are so thought-provoking, that I used a quote from this book as the opening to my memoir, If I Live Until Morning.
This pataphysical journey up a mountain whose "summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human beings" depicts an allegorical landscape akin to Alice in Wonderland
A beloved cult classic of surrealism, pataphysics and Gurdjieffian mysticism, René Daumal’s Mount Analogue is the allegorical tale of an expedition to a mountain whose existence can only be deduced, not observed. As its numerous editions (most now rare) over the decades attest, the book has been highly influential: Alejandro Jodorowsky's visionary 1973 film The Holy Mountain is a loose adaptation of the book, and John Zorn based an eponymous album on it.…
