Books n Stuff

​You would think books would be really easy to draw. They're just rectangles and boxes.  Aren't they? 

I suppose it depends on how accurately you want to represent those shapes.  

There are a lot of straight lines on books.  Straight lines are hard to draw without a ruler. Then again, as you can see below not all of the lines are absolutely straight.  If I used a ruler it might help but I am sure it would look stilted and robot like - which is not what I am going for.  

The books I have represented below were sitting on the coffee table in the living room. I thought I would actually try to observe what a book actually looks like. I decided here not to concentrate on the text and graphics on the cover. In the limited time I gave myself to draw this. I tried to represent them as accurately as possible.

The following dimensions were things I discovered in the drawing of books on coffee table. 

1.  Text and graphics in cover - blurred because text is difficult to represent in limited time and I wasn't sure how to do that.  
2.  Straight lines - difficult with free hand drawing - lines can get wobbly 
3.  Perspective - Single point perspective - I don't think I paid enough attention to vanishing points but tried to take it into account.
4.  Tone - light and dark
5.  Pages - How do you represent pages between the covers of the book?  I tried to use multiple lines. 
6.  Shadows - The books are kind of floating because there is no shadow grounding them.  

The end result, i think, can be recognized as books stacked. In my opinion, a good book is more easily read than drawn.  More time might help. 

I'll keep on practicing and trying to make little improvements here and there. 

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