Learning Art: Roadmap to Mastery through Books

Starting with generic foundational knowledge is crucial when learning a new skill, gradually progressing to more specific applications.

### Mastering Art Skills: A Roadmap from General to Specific Knowledge Using Books
* 📚 When learning a new skill like art, it's crucial to start with the **most mentioned, general foundational knowledge** and gradually progress towards **more specific applications**.
* 🎯 Any knowledge covered in multiple books is likely the **most important** and should be **mastered first**.
* 🔍 The best way to find the most impactful books is to cross-reference **Google survey results**, **Amazon reviews**, and **Nielsen BookScan sales numbers**.
* 📖 Books are special because they force their creators to **logically map out and refine every point** they want to express in a **concise manner**.
* 🔄 Re-reading the same book or using tools like Anki for spaced repetition learning allows you to **gain new insights and expand your understanding** with each revisit.
* 🎨 The most useful books for learning art in a generic to specific way include **Scott Robertson's "How to Draw" and "How to Render,"** **Emma Block's "Get Started with Gouache,"** and **3D Total Publishing's "Colour and Light."**
* 🏞 For landscape painting, Mitchell Albala's "Landscape Painting" and "The Landscape Painter’s Workbook" provide valuable lessons on **simplifying forms, framing, color mixing, and composition**.
* 🎨 When it comes to anatomy, Tom Fox's "Drawing Form and Pose" approaches figure drawing from a **3D perspective**, while "Anatomy for Sculptors" by Uldis Zarins breaks down the body into **forms and muscle details**.
* 📚 "Books are the **distillation of an individual's lifetime of knowledge and experience**, allowing for the **rapid transfer of learning**."

Time for another video, and before we get started, a big thank you and shout out once again to everyone who has liked and subscribed so far. This is a channel dedicated to helping others improve as artists, in the most efficient manner possible, by leveraging the research of neuroscience, meta-learning, and autodidacticism. And today, I’d like to finish our discussion on spaced repetition learning with a look into something that people have shown a great deal of interest in, which is the books I have used as a lodestar to take me towards mastery of painting and drawing. Some of these books you might have seen before if you follow the channel, but I will show some I have never discussed before too. So today we will be looking at: How to find the best books when trying to learn a new skill The books I use personally Why books are special in the world of learning

and why we have as a global society 
forgotten their true meaning and usage. I’ve said this before, but I want you to 
remember something. When seeking sources   to learn from, especially as a beginner, 
you want to avoid getting too specific,   and instead focus on the broadest, most generic,   most abstracted principles you can find, 
as these will propel you the furthest. What I mean by that is…
If you are a total beginner at art,   and start following an online course 
for how to draw anime characters,   and it jumps into things like clothing folds 
and poses, you will probably fail like I did. The reason is that this teacher is probably 
already good at drawing generically,   that is drawing foundational things, like 
anatomy and three-dimensional looking   volumes. Yet now they are teaching something 
specific, like clothing folds and poses. If you try to train this specific 
thing with no general foundation,

then you will probably find that your drawings look off, and become dissatisfied with your work. Unless you understand perspective, and line weight, and overlap, and anatomy and shape language and all of these more general artistic concepts, you will NEVER be able to more specifically draw anime characters as well as the people who are drawing with these foundations already under their belt. The problem I have found is that most teachers are coming at you from that position, and assuming that you are there too. It’s not their fault. They assume you already know the basic stuff. They might even mention how you should be using it in passing, but it takes a while to learn it, and so you struggle along with the content, getting more and more annoyed, and giving up on art. Simply put, most courses, YouTube videos and books, tend to assume some pre-existing skill and experience. As I grew more frustrated with these materials, and their lack of prerequisite teaching

I wondered why nobody had ever just made a simple roadmap that took you from being a total beginner to being able to draw or paint whatever you want. If that was even possible. But, my prayers were answered when I discovered Scott Robertson’s books, how to draw and how to render. It’s not so much that Scott is an amazing artist. He is, but there are many of those. What separates Scott’s books from those of others is that he is a good TEACHER, and that is what you should be seeking out when carrying out your searches for good sources of education. Whereas other learning sources may gloss over certain key aspects, or explain them in a confusing order, Scott seems to be able say the most, with the least amount of words, and get you doing the things that make the biggest difference in your learning. Some of the stuff I will cover today is specific to things like landscapes or comic books.

but these two books, How to Draw and How to Render, are the most general. They don’t cover drawing heads or scenery or comic book panels, but I promise you that everything in here will be used for the rest of your life when drawing or painting anything. If you are a total beginner, this is a great place to start. If you are experienced, but getting frustrated, then you probably need to brush up on the things in here. Basically, whoever you are, these books will probably benefit your art in some way, and none of the other books in the video today can claim that. And better still, it’s laid out as a road map, and covers the generic, most abstracted principles of drawing form. It takes you from drawing lines and circles without a ruler or guides, to grasping basic perspective, and then complex perspective. You learn how to turn the simple

forms you can draw into airplanes, and then cars, 
while considering camera lenses and view angles. It teaches you that everything you could 
ever want to draw is made up of cross-sections in 3D space, and how to combine 
them to make anything, from any angle. This is exactly what we see artists like 
Kim Jung Gi doing, albeit in his head, and this is really the entire conceptual overview 
of the How to Draw book - that 2D cross-sections, arranged in perspective, make realistic 
looking three-dimensional volumes. The second book builds on the first, showing 
how to plot shadows for your objects, and assign values to them to make 
them appear solid. From there, you will learn how value is related to colour, 
how to make things more or less reflective, and how to make them look like they 
are made from different materials. This forms a fantastic foundation to take you 
from the more general aspects of art, to the

world of more specific things like landscape or 
anatomy, or the intricacies of colour and light. The roadmap style of these books, and 
their very generic, foundational focus, is my main reason for recommending them so highly. (diagram of fields of study, starting 
from here in abstract concepts) Another book that works like this but is more 
specific in scope is Get Started with Gouache by Emma Block. It features a simple lesson plan 
to follow that takes you from painting swatches with different colours, or opacities 
of paint, to working in negative space, and building up to eventually painting 
animals, food, people and places. You can work in a simple illustrative style like 
she does to get a feel for the medium of gouache very quickly, or apply knowledge you have from 
other books and resources to build on these simple lessons and make them whatever you want. She has 
a similar book on water colours as well. She’s

an excellent teacher and author who has clearly considered how to best take you along a logical path from getting used to how paint handles, to using it to make complex images like landscapes. Another painter who produces books like this is Viktoria Semjonova, but I personally prefer the lessons and examples covered by Emma Block. That’s just me though. Speaking of painting, I only started learning to paint early this year. It’s a complex subject that can be thought of as equal parts mastering the actual medium and mastery of how colour and light work. I chose roadmap style books like those just discussed to start learning it, because they present a clear and logical path to take you in baby steps from a total beginner to actually standing on your own and running your own experiments. But there are other books that take a different, slightly more openly experimental approach from the beginning. You’ve probably already seen me mention the book Rediscovering Gouache by Aljoscha Blau.

While not so much of a roadmap style book, it explores many different ways to work with gouache, which are highly unique. He uses sponges and reed pens to create specific textures, and while colour and light are mentioned, I consider this more of a valuable book for learning how the medium of gouache works, and the experimental approach it encourages the reader to undertake in learning that. This is the next best sort of book when no ‘road map’ is present - experimental encouragement. It should give you an idea, and encourage you to experiment with it and stress test it to see what you can do with it. This is closer to the concept of immersion learning, where we just roll up our sleeves and start doing the work without any basic training. But instead of blindly jumping into immersion and struggling, we have someone telling us what to do, and what to avoid, which will save you time in your learning.

I have another book on gouache I use, which is 
The Art of Gouache by Jeremy Ford, and this one features some interesting uses of gouache in 
what he refers to as a poster style, which is how a lot of the old school iconic British Rail 
adverts were created. My older UK viewers may fondly remember them. I also like his approach to 
painting gradients with gouache, and once again, I consider this more of a ‘how to use gouache’ 
book than a ‘how to use colour and light’ book. This one is the weakest in terms of teaching 
and really just contains a few techniques the artist uses and how he does them, 
which is useful but not for a beginner. Those books were viewing paint more 
in terms of the ‘technical skill’ pillar. That is how the paint 
handles and ways to apply it. When looking for books on painting, you 
might find that they tend to fit this format.

and cover more on how to use the 
paint, be it oil or water colour,   than how to use paint to represent reality. To look more closely at representing reality,   we do need to become well-versed 
in using colour and light expertly. This has been a huge stumbling block for me, 
and the main reason I have probably started   and stopped painting several times 
in my life. I would paint using the   colours straight from the tubes, and yet the 
colours would end up muddy, or looking off,   compared to these artists I admire who can 
make the paint look as if it’s glowing,   or like there is real light and 
shadow at play on a piece of paper. My favourite book on this subject is 
Colour and Light, by 3D Total Publishing. They are a UK-based company 
that make a lot of art books,   and we will see some more of their products 
later. They have some material available

for free on their website, so you 
might consider checking them out. Colour and Light starts very simply 
by walking you through the individual aspects of colour in terms of importance, 
which would be value, chroma, and hue. It discusses the difference 
between chroma and saturation, how exposure works, and how to key a 
painting to get the correct exposure. In this sense, it’s a bit 
of a road map style book, but leaning more heavily on 
the theory side of things. My favourite aspect is that 
it specifically tells you how you can isolate and train 
some of these aspects though. For example if you want to 
play with chroma in Photoshop, you paint with a single colour, while only 
adjusting the value and saturation sliders. This will limit your ability to 
select colours to a narrow range, as you only will be able to make a single 
hue warmer, cooler, lighter, or darker.

To do this with traditional paint, just pick a warm and cool variant of any single color, black, and white. This is how I am learning to wrap my head around how artists with more mileage than me see color, and how they decide which direction to adjust their paints in as they work. I value these a-ha moments whenever I find them, as they help me level up my knowledge and understanding. Sometimes, you just need someone to explain things to you in a certain way. It also talks about light and how it works, which overlaps with a lot of the stuff in the How to Render book, but I do not mind this. When looking at books, many of them repeat the same thing, but this helps us immensely. That’s because if something is mentioned so prolifically across so many books, then it’s probably the most important thing to study. That means we want to spend more time there.

mastering that thing first, in order 
to get the biggest gains in skill. It’s also beneficial to have the same 
info explained by different authors, who give their own twist, and help you 
to understand the subject from slightly nuanced perspectives, fleshing out 
your own personal understanding. The book then goes even further, by showing you 
how a bunch of super talented artists like Guweiz and Nathan Fowkes, go about constructing their 
paintings, using the information you just learned. This is great, because instead of getting one 
artist, usually the author, showing how they apply a lesson, we get different, high profile 
artists showing us their individual approaches. We can compare what they all do, and what they 
do differently to one another. Pretty useful. One thing that annoys people about 3D Total, 
is that their books always feature a gallery section in the back. That means this big hefty 
book you just got might be a third full of

people’s paintings, and only two-thirds full of 
learning information. I understand that complaint,   but I personally like the gallery sections, as 
they help to demonstrate different ways artists   have used the information in the book, 
and give you new sources of inspiration. A lot of this is about trying to get 
as much as you can out of any one book,   so even something which is ‘just filler’ can 
have some valuable knowledge extracted from it. Another book I highly recommend is 
Colour and Light by James Gurney. Yes,   it has the same name as the previous 
book. This one doesn’t feel like it   explains things as logically as the 3D Total 
book, but for a long time this was the only   book on the market that even discussed 
this stuff in an easily digestible way. It explains things that the 3D Total book 
lacks as well, like specific lighting setups   such as contre jour, and how they impact us 
emotionally. It also shows how the old masters

used colour and light back in the days when far fewer pigments were available to paint with. Unlike the 3D Total book, it makes no mention of digital art, so that might affect its usefulness to you. Other books I would give an honourable mention to are Alla Prima, by Richard Schmidt, which is fantastic, but relates to mostly oils, and assumes a fair bit of pre-existing skill. Another I like for watercolours is Mastering Atmosphere and Mood in Watercolour by Joseph Zbukvic. But from the names alone, you can probably tell that these books deal with more advanced, specific areas of painting, and are not that beginner-friendly as a result. No road maps to guide you here, but they do feature ideas and experiments for you to try once you have some experience. While colour and light are used to great effect in everything from product concepts to portraits.

one of the areas where you really do need to 
have them mastered is in painting landscapes. If the things we have covered so far are 
generic, and getting gradually more specific, now we have entered a niche. 
Painting the scenery around us. To paint landscapes, you need everything 
covered in the books we have mentioned so far - a good solid grounding in 
form, some skill with handling paint, and a knowledge of how value, 
colour, and light work. Landscapes bring their own challenges, and one 
such headache for a beginner is composition. Not only do we have to be able to do 
all the things we have looked at so far, but we also have to be able 
to narrow our focus to zone out most of the stuff in our vision of 
the vast landscape we are in front of, and paint just a small slice of it, possibly 
even altering it to fit our canvas better. Composition is equal parts logical and emotional. 
Where we place elements on a canvas appeases us as

humans when done correctly, and like any system, 
this can be exploited to evoke certain emotions within the viewer. Combine this with all the 
knowledge you have now for colour and light, and you should be able to lead the viewer’s 
eyes to wherever you want them to go, and capture what fascinates you about your scene. There is one author who I really 
like for landscapes specifically, and that’s Mitchell Albala. He 
has two books which are actually very similar called Landscape Painting, 
and the Landscape Painter’s Workbook. The latter is the newer one, and acts like 
a bit of an update to the first. You see, the first one was more about working in oils, 
but the second book generalises the lessons, there’s that word again, to make 
them more readily applicable for people who work in soft pastels, 
watercolours or anything else. The books take you through the importance of 
value in a different way to the other books we

have seen so far. You will learn that thinking in 
just two values, black and white, is ultimately all you need to direct the eye to wherever 
you want in a painting. You’ll be doing paint studies using 4 values to break the landscape up 
into the sky, areas that directly face the sky, which we call ground planes, areas that half 
face the sky, and areas that do not face the sky. It’s a remarkably similar system to the one 
employed by Scott Robertson in How to Render, and that’s because it’s just how light works! However, this version of the system is viewed 
through the lens of landscapes exclusively. You’ll also work on how to frame 
the vast landscape in front of you, more on colour, especially on mixing greens, 
and making decisions about what to include, but more importantly, what to omit 
from the scene in front of you. And that’s the reason I like the books so much. 
Painting landscapes or anything else is really

about learning to see in a very specific way, where we subtract as much detail as possible, to paint the most basic information. These books will teach you how to see like that, and that is something we can then apply to other things, like painting people. Anatomy is probably the biggest stumbling block for most people, I think. When I started learning anatomy, I got confused by the fact that some artists quickly just used gestural drawing to make awesome figures, while others meticulously crafted perfect anatomical images. Then there was anime and comic books, and across this broad spectrum of different anatomical styles, I didn’t see how learning the muscles or figure drawing eventually led to any one of them. How important were all these muscle groups and stuff? Can you really memorize them like Kim Jung Gi and be able to draw them from any angle, purely from imagination? You can, but in order to manage that, you really do need to have mastered the stuff.

we discussed earlier in this video first. 
Anatomy is a more specific offshoot, a niche, like landscapes, and so it has to be supported 
by those foundational skills we saw earlier. Once you can draw boxes in perspective 
from imagination, you realise that the human body and any part of it fits inside a 
box, and that’s most of the work done for you. The rest is a little understanding of proportions, and the shapes and forms of the different body 
parts, how they lock together, move, and deform. Sounds simple, but you and I 
both know that it’s anything but. I have many anatomy books in my collection, including the ones that I was recommended 
to pick up when I started learning - the classics by authors George Bridgman, 
Burne Hogarth, and Andrew Loomis. You’ve likely heard of the Loomis method, for 
example, as the go-to way to construct a head.

I spent a long time just copying images from these books, and when I tried to draw a human without the book… something annoying happened. I failed miserably. I couldn’t recall exactly how things looked, or get the angles right, and this was down to just copying the sketches as shapes, like tracing them but on a different page with no tracing paper. I was good at copying the shapes and angles in the drawings, but was not thinking about them as 3D forms, turning in space. To help get you on the right track, there is a more recent book that approaches figure drawing entirely from this viewpoint, and that’s Drawing Form and Pose by Tom Fox. Tom is an interesting guy. He had no art experience, and studied zoology at university. He worried he would have no applicable skills upon graduating, and wanted to practise something cheap and easy to pick up, so he started drawing.

A decade or so later, and he’s gone from total noob to almost Kim Jung Gi levels, able to draw figures and entire scenes totally from imagination. If he can do it, so can I, and so can you! His book starts by introducing you to the most important ways to depict form, which are thinking in 3D, XYZ terms (the same as Scott Robertson again, so this must be important), but it also covers some new concepts you can bring into your drawing which we have not encountered yet. This would be things like using overlap to create depth, simplification to make the viewer fill in the blanks of your drawings, leaving gaps in lines, foreshortening, and contour drawing, where we focus on the silhouette of the figure, in more 2D terms. This gives us multiple approaches to drawing. We can work in the three dimensional XYZ terms we have seen so far, but also draw the figure as a flat two-dimensional

cardboard cutout, and both have 
their merits and limitations. The majority of the book, however, is 
dedicated to exactly what I mentioned earlier - how each part of the body 
is broken down into simple forms, how they fit together, and how 
they move and deform in space. There is one more thing that my time 
studying has revealed about anatomy though, and I feel this is what makes it one of 
the things that people find hard to get their head around initially upon 
trying to draw the human figure. Let’s say Tom’s work is at 50% on a sliding scale. 
He only shows as much detail on his figures as is necessary, letting the brain of the viewer fill 
in the blanks. This concept of reduction and simplification is another very important lesson 
to understand for all of art, but it can be hard to express that limited detail without knowledge 
of the more complex detail it actually represents.

As such, if we move all the way to the right on the scale to 100%, where we draw maximum detail, we have this book, Anatomy for Sculptors by Uldis Zarins. It says it’s for sculptors, but you can use it for painting and drawing too. It breaks down the body into forms like Fox’s book does, but in a different way, as well as showing you the actual fiber level muscle detail, should you care to learn that. I use this book to make sure I understand the body in great detail, but then I will draw it more at that 50% level, like Tom Fox does. But there is another thing that we see some artists do. They reduce the body down even further, sliding that scale to the left, transforming it into more shapes or quick gestures. This is more like what some cartoonists or anime achieve - an understandable human figure, but stylized.

If you suck at drawing anime, this may be why. Can you see how these artists possess everything we have covered so far, including the anatomy slider being closer to 100%? If you only ever train down here at 10%, drawing anime, you do not understand enough about the higher levels to reduce it down correctly. I have found that the best books for viewing anatomy through this simplified lens are some books by a South Korean artist called Taco. They have a couple of books called Point Character Drawing, and Secret Character Drawing. I only have the Point one right now, as the other one has not been translated into English yet. This book is useful for a couple of things. Firstly, it breaks down some of the simple measurements and checks you can bear in mind when constructing figures to make them look more correct. For example, the distance between the hairline and nose is usually the same measurement as the length of the neck.

Once you have that internalized, a quick check in your drawing, and you can make a character look more, or less, realistic. It also deals with anatomy in this simpler, shape-based approach, showing you how you can depict more complex three-dimensional forms using placements of shapes. I would not recommend doing this unless you have spent some time thinking in 3D, or you will end up doing what I did - being excellent at drawing these shapes, but not able to draw them from any angle without the book handy, because 3D will be alien to you. Learn form first, then learn to reduce it with books like this. You can also hopefully now see why just copying your favorite manga, anime, or comics might not have actually given you the skills to draw like the creators you admire. They drew that cute anime girl thinking about reduced anatomy and 3D forms, whereas you are copying shapes, in 2D, from

that reduced outcome, never appreciating the more advanced framework secretly hidden underneath it! If you understand the framework though, then you can go nuts and start to copy your faves to develop a bit of their style. I have a whole bunch of manga books that I got mostly to read, but also for the art. Manga books didn’t really start appearing in stores where I live in the UK until maybe the mid noughties, like 2004 when I was in my late teens. I remember the first time I saw Blade of the Immortal, and was instantly hooked. I had to be able to draw like this! I copied so many images from those books, and still like to do this occasionally to this day, but I do so understanding that Hiroaki Samura and other artists like him, are creating these with a very potent understanding of everything we have discussed so far, as well as a new skill - how to assemble images to tell a story.

That is something you can learn from copying these books though. Other favourites of mine include anything by Sean Murphy, Mike Mignola, Rafael Albuquerque, and Jason Latour. I really like Chainsaw Man by Tatsuki Fujimoto at the moment too. When you look at art you admire, try and think what it is you like, and focus on that if you want to do studies like this. Try and really hone in on the thing you want to absorb from the art, and practise that. Is it the expressive line work? The way the anatomy is simplified? The mastery of difficult perspectives? This can then inform you and show you what more generic things to train to help you reach their levels. (link to goal setting vid) The issue with this sort of copying from books, however, is that it is unguided. You are not being explicitly taught art lessons by the author.

but have to have enough skill to be able to find them expressed in their finished work. Another book that gets an honourable mention for storytelling is Framed Ink by Marcus Mateu-Mestre. This book examines what a lot of your favourite comic artists and film directors are doing all the time - telling stories with images, and the placement of elements on the canvas, page, or screen. It’s quite similar to the Albala landscape books in that it focuses on 2 values, black and white, and how we can use lighting and placement of forms and shapes to guide the eye, invoke emotions, and tell our stories. It will change the way you watch movies! You can use the simple templates in the book to experiment with your own compositions. Another book that I found to be the simplest for learning this concept is Picture This by Molly Bang. It uses cut pieces of card, rearranged with each turning of the page.

to help exaggerate certain ideas, 
we want to express to the viewer,   and it’s another one of those books that’s 
excellent because it’s set out like a roadmap,   and deals with a very general concept that can 
be applied to all of art. Every time you turn   the page, she has tweaked her composition 
to exaggerate an idea she wants to express,   and you can see it happening for 
yourself. It makes learning very easy. There are other specialist niches 
in art you might want to track down   books for that I have not covered here, like 
working with oil paints, or drawing animals. There is also observational drawing, 
which is a basic skill, and for   which I would recommend the book 
Drawing Course by Charles Bargue,   but I want to discuss observational 
drawing separately in a future video. These books are all more specific, and we 
are getting to the little nooks and crannies

of art that you probably shouldn’t be concerned with until you have a firm grasp of the basics. For example, I have another couple of books by 3D Total here. One is The Beginner’s Guide to Creating Portraits, and the other is The Beginners Guide to Digital Painting in Photoshop. How specific is that? No mention of colour theory or value here. Just how to get up and running in Photoshop. If you bought this book alone as a beginner wanting to learn to paint, your paintings would never reach the lofty heights of the artists using Photoshop that you admire, because, remember, they have mastered the more generic foundational principles. They are not mentioned in this book, it assumes you know them, so you would get frustrated when your paintings don’t look like the examples shown. There is one more thing you may have picked up on so far… Although these books are awesome, no single book covers everything.

You need a collection of books and other resources to build up a decent idea of how a field really works in order to learn it. This may also include in-person lessons, online courses, or anything else you feel you can learn from. So why do I find books so useful? (SO ARE BOOKS THE BEST WAY TO LEARN ART?) I have probably taken as many art courses as I have read books, and I’m still no expert. Sitting through these videos and courses, just like reading the books, will do nothing for you. It’s the practice bit we need. These resources are merely a guide. Videos and courses are better than books in that we can see the process in action, which I find useful for reinforcing what I learn from the books. Some people prefer to learn via courses, or even YouTube, and there are people with conditions like dyslexia who really cannot use books to learn from very well. That’s totally fine.

everyone learns differently, but there 
really is something special about books. Books force their creators to logically map out 
every point they want to express, and then refine it to fit inside a limited page count. It has 
to be poignant, and simple. Videos are usually compressed down to a timelapse in order to achieve 
the same thing, and while not always the case, they tend to suffer as a result, delivering 
watered down lessons, my videos included. If you take something like an autobiography, what you hold is an entire person’s life - all 
their lessons learned, all their experience, and all their knowledge, in a single tome. 
Non-fiction books may contain ideas and concepts that an individual like Stephen Hawking 
dedicated their entire life to grappling with. He sat down and wrote about everything he 
learned, decades of work, condensed into an easily digestible block of paper for you to get 
up to speed with in just a few days of reading.

Can you see the power in this? Books allow 
for the transfer of knowledge very quickly, and this is how human society has grown 
to the levels it has. We can distil down an entire lifetime's worth of lessons, 
capture them, and teach them to others. But there’s a problem, and I was first made aware of it by the book Moonwalking 
with Einstein, by Joshua Foer. It’s about an American journalist going 
from writing a piece about the world memory championships, to training for and winning the 
very same championship a year or two later. If you are interested in meta-learning and neuroscience, 
it’s a good book - but not so much for art though. In the book, Joshua talks about how back in 
mediaeval times, books were not commonplace like they are today, because paper was costly, and they 
had to be copied BY HAND. There was no print yet. If you went to somebody’s house, instead of asking 
to see their brand new games console or graphics

card that nobody can seem to buy anywhere, you 
would have asked to see their book. Crazy right? And these books were precious, because they 
all contained ideas and concepts that only the wealthy could afford to learn. Instead of 
going to Paris to learn directly from someone, you could read their writings, and learn that 
way instead. It was revolutionary. People would only own a single book; they were that 
expensive, and when they finished reading it, they started over, and read it again, fiercely 
trying to internalize the knowledge it contained. It was effectively spaced 
repetition learning (link to vid)! But then, something happened. Around 1463, 
Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, and suddenly books became quite easy to create. This was another revolution, 
because it democratized books, and therefore learning. Now, anyone, 
rich or poor, could learn to read, and then read to learn, but it had 
another effect on us, an unforeseen one.

Because books were now cheaper, we read 
them, and then left them on the shelf, or threw them away. We would read them one time, and move onto the next one, retaining very 
little of the information inside them. I bet if I asked you what you can 
remember about a book you have read, you would only be able to recall snippets, 
perhaps the bits that had the most impact on you. But by re-reading the same book, or better 
yet, a book chopped up into anki cards, you gain the ability to glean new 
information every time you revisit it, and by making notes in it you expand your 
understanding of the subject further. There are more books than we 
will ever be able to read, and more knowledge out there than we will ever 
be able to learn, so we need to find the books that will impact us the most, and, here’s 
the key difference, study them repeatedly.

That’s really what I use Anki for. I am trying to treat books in the same way they were once seen, with the respect they deserve, and an appreciation for the knowledge they contain. Tom Fox spent 10,000 hours drawing, and I can learn everything he learned in that timeframe, in far less time, because of his efforts, by studying his book. He captured all that effort and consideration about how best to draw the figure, and condensed it, distilling it down into a couple hundred pages. He did a lot of the hard work for us, so it will take us less than 10,000 hours to get as good as him. So how do we find the best books for a subject we wish to learn? The best way I have encountered to find the best books comes from Tim Ferriss in the 4 Hour Chef. He wanted to learn cooking, and so set off on a quest to find the best handful of cook

books - which, as you can imagine, is no easy 
feat, as there are thousands in existence. He figured them out by cross-referencing 
Google survey results, Amazon reviews,   and Nielsen BookScan sales numbers. Any book that scored highly on all 3 
from beginner cooks was shortlisted   as a potential candidate, because 
beginner cooks found it useful. Nowadays, there is likely an AI that 
can do that all for you very simply,   and I have experimented with Gigabrain for this. I’m not affiliated with the product in 
any way, but it effectively scans Reddit   to find what real people think about things 
like products on Amazon and summarises it   for you. It’s not as in-depth or accurate as 
Tim’s method, but it gets the job done faster. We can use tools like these to quickly 
and unbiasedly critique books and other   sources of education, to narrow down 
our search and find the ones that

will get us where we want to be, in the 
fastest, most efficient way possible. So to recap, today we have looked at: How when learning a new skill, it’s important 
that we start with the most mentioned, general foundational knowledge, and gradually 
work towards more specific applications. How any knowledge which is covered in multiple 
books must be the thing we spend the most time trying to master, as it’s the most important.
How to find books that best fit that description. Why books are special.
And the books I have found most useful for learning art 
in such a generic to specific way. Hopefully you found that interesting and useful, 
so thank you for listening. As I mentioned, as well as books, I have also undertaken 
many courses on painting and drawing, so I’ll produce a video at some point 
covering the best of those that I have found. I am always on the hunt for new books 
and educational resources to help me.

in my learning journey, so please feel free to 
share anything you rate highly in the comments,   and I’ll check it out. Perhaps there was some   book or course that you felt really 
helped you progress rapidly in skill. Next time, I will be back with a 
brand new art learning experiment,   as we enter the fascinating world of accelerated 
learning, so join me next time if you’d like   to learn how to rapidly improve your art within 
just 1 month. Sounds too good to be true, right? See you next time.

The Books I Use to Self-Learn Art --- general to specific

10,000hrs

Mastering Art: The Power of Foundational Books

Foundational books are crucial for learning art, providing broad and abstract principles for beginners to build a strong base.

Scott Robertson's "How to Draw" and "How to Render" are highlighted as the most beneficial, offering a roadmap from basic to complex techniques, teaching everything from basic perspective to creating realistic 3D volumes.

These books are valuable for both beginners and experienced artists, providing a solid foundation for improving art skills.

Roadmap-style books like "Get Started with Gouache" provide a clear lesson plan for beginners to master the medium and progress to painting various subjects.

"Rediscovering Gouache" takes a more experimental approach, encouraging readers to explore unique techniques and textures, making it suitable for immersion learning.

"The Art of Gouache" focuses on the technical skills of using gouache, such as painting gradients and using the medium in a poster style, but it's less suitable for beginners in this art form.

The book "Colour and Light" provides a comprehensive guide to understanding color, light, and exposure in painting, offering a roadmap for artists to improve their skills.

It also includes insights from talented artists like Guweiz and Nathan Fowkes on how they construct their paintings, providing diverse perspectives for the readers.

Despite some criticism for its gallery section, the book offers valuable knowledge and inspiration for artists.

Mastering Landscape Painting and Anatomy for Artists

Landscape painting requires a solid foundation in form, paint handling, and understanding of value, color, and light.

Composition is a key challenge for beginners, as it requires the ability to focus on a small part of the landscape and manipulate it to fit the canvas.

Mitchell Albala's books, "Landscape Painting" and the "Landscape Painter’s Workbook," provide valuable lessons on using value to direct the viewer's eye and the importance of color and framing in landscape painting.

When it comes to anatomy, it is essential to master foundational skills such as perspective drawing before delving into the complexities of the human body.

Authors like George Bridgman, Burne Hogarth, and Andrew Loomis offer classic resources for learning anatomy and figure drawing.

Mastering Figure Drawing: A Comprehensive Guide

Copying 2D shapes without considering 3D forms led to drawing difficulties, which "Drawing Form and Pose" by Tom Fox addresses by emphasizing the depiction of form and introducing new concepts like overlap, simplification, foreshortening, and contour drawing.

"Anatomy for Sculptors" by Uldis Zarins provides in-depth anatomical details, while emphasizing the importance of simplification, similar to the approach of some cartoonists and anime artists.

"Point Character Drawing" by Taco offers a simplified lens for viewing anatomy and provides guidance on constructing figures for a more accurate look, using simple measurements and checks.

The Importance of Understanding 3D Forms in Drawing

Understanding 3D forms is crucial for creating realistic characters and objects in art.

Copying 2D shapes from manga or comics may not help develop the skills needed to draw from different angles without guidance.

Studying the work of favorite artists can help absorb their style and skills, but it's essential to focus on specific elements like expressive line work or simplified anatomy.

Books provide a foundational understanding of art, but they may not cover everything a beginner needs to know.

A collection of books and other resources is necessary to build a strong knowledge base in art.

Despite the rise of videos and online courses, books offer a unique and valuable way to quickly transfer knowledge and have played a crucial role in the growth of human society.

The Importance of Revisiting Books for Deeper Learning

Books are often read once, with little information retained, but re-reading and taking notes can lead to a deeper understanding of the subject.

The key is to study the same book repeatedly to gain new information and expand knowledge.

Using tools like AI and Google surveys can help critique and find the most impactful books for efficient learning.