Two hundred-plus drawings by working artists, mostly people Birch found online, each one printed with a short note on how it was done. Ball-point pen on found paper. Crosshatching with a dip pen. Gouache over a photocopy. Colored ink on graph paper. Oil pastel scraped back. She zooms in on details so you can see the actual marks, then tells you what tool made them. There’s no project to complete and no skill ladder to climb — it’s a book of other people’s solutions, arranged so you can flip to what interests you and steal it. The reference section at the back covers pencil grades, paper sizes, stretching paper, and color. It’s pocket-sized, and the point is to look at somebody’s line and think, I could try that
Freehand