Tuesday 7 June 2016

Grids - A Drawing Book for Squares by Jacky Bahbout (Thames and Hudson)

I must admit, I couldn't help but steal this book away from Charlotte at every opportunity. As a dyed-in-the-wool doodler, I love books that not only give you the opportunity to doodle away - but give you a fresh perspective with neat ideas to get you sharpening your pencils for a bit of creative fun.

"Grids - A Drawing Book for Squares" by Jacky Bahbout is a doodler's dream. Packed with interesting geometric patterns and designs, it will kick start your imagination as you realise just how much fun you can have with pixel art, perspective drawing and grid lines.

Hidden away inside the book is a huge selection of really cool drawing exercises that will have you thinking in different dimensions. Personally I utterly adore drawing in squares (I think it's a misspent youth largely wasted making weird little games on my ZX Spectrum where all the graphics were made out of 8 x 8 grids - I spent AGES poring over graph paper to try and make natural-looking game graphics and characters but never really got very far!)

Grids is a work of genius. Kids may think that the exercises are complicated at first, but with some brilliant examples to follow, they'll soon be creating really intriguing works of art themselves.

Released in good time for the long summer holidays and those 'bored' hours where kids will wail and squeak about having nothing to do, "Grids" is perfect for your little pencil pushers so pick up a copy as soon as you can!

Charlotte's favourite bit: Drawing amazingly intricate animals from square templates

Daddy's favourite bit: I just loved that forced perspective graph paper, drawing cityscapes and buildings using that.

(Kindly sent to us for review by Thames and Hudson)

"Grids - A Drawing Book for Squares"

Written and Illustrated by Jacky Bahbout

Published by Thames and Hudson

Publication Date: 6th June 2016