Benable — create shareable lists of things you recommend!
E.g., products you love, local businesses, travel recs - you can add anything to a Benable list!
Here's my Best Drawing Books for Kids, Begginers, and Intermediate Artists
36
items If your kids love drawing books. So, in this list, I will share my recommendations for the best books you can find to help you to learn drawing!
Sections
12
Best Drawing Books for Kids, Teens, and Teenagers
Older Kids, Teens, and Teenagers
People and Characters – Portraits, Comics, Anime, Manga
Plants, Animals, and Nature
Fashion Design
Science Fiction and Fantasy
Best Drawing Books for Kids, Teens, and Teenagers
📍For Young Kids
For younger kids, this super simple book doesn’t try to explain concepts or techniques but instead teaches through very easy and clear step-by-step exercises, allowing your child to practice and see results appear – almost magically – before them.
How to Draw 101 Animals
Like the 101 Animals book above, this is a very simple, step-by-step workbook that doesn’t confuse your kids with abstract ideas but instead lets the concepts and techniques come to them naturally by simply drawing and seeing what appears.
How to Draw Book for Kids: Step-by-Step Guide
The perfect next step for younger kids, this book still stays away from concepts and boring explanations, but expands your child’s understanding and technique simply by covering a wider range of objects and subjects and very slightly more advanced pr...
All the Things: How to Draw for Kids
Older Kids, Teens, and Teenagers
📍For Older Kids
For older kids, this is a fantastic book for learning and practicing – it teaches you basic concepts clearly and easily and gives tons of fun exercises and clear illustrations.
The Big Book of Drawing: 500+ Challenges for Kids
A really fun way to learn, see and understand line, shape, perspective, three-dimensionality, relationship, and how things appear – so many fun examples and exercises, each of which can be applied to more “serious” drawing and artwork.
How to Draw Cool Things: Optical Illusions & 3D Letters
People and Characters – Portraits, Comics, Anime, Manga
📍Drawing Faces, Portrait, People and anime
A really fun and really easy way for younger kids to learn to draw faces with life, personality, and style.
The Big Book of Faces: 400 Easy Drawing Lessons
A nice balance between concept and practice, this clear and complete book focuses on the most important aspects of portrait drawing and brings forward the importance of life and realism as well as accuracy.
Portrait Drawing for Kids: Step-by-Step Guide
A great book for adults, this thorough and thoughtful step-by-step guide teaches proportion, balance, line, and flow of realistic shapes and poses with an ideal combination of illustration, practice, and concept and a fun and fresh approach.
Figure It Out! Beginner's Guide to Drawing People
A very clear and complete guide to drawing Anime and Manga-style characters, as well as learning the basics of general portrait and character drawing. Excellent instructions and guides keep your kid encouraged and having fun.
How to Draw Anime & Manga Faces: Step Guide
Plants, Animals, and Nature
📍Drawing plants, Animals and Nature
The title and the cover make this book seem very basic – and it is – but despite the almost cartoonish look of some of the drawings, which is great for kids, they learn how to draw plants and flowers that are realistic and effective.
Learn to Draw Cute Flowers, Plants & Trees
A comprehensive book of step-by-step lessons on drawing all kinds of creatures, this is a simple and fun approach from one of the most popular and beloved authors of kids’ drawing books.
Draw 200 Animals: Step-by-Step Guide
A thorough and intelligent approach to drawing landscapes and natural elements, this wonderful book is also easy and fun.
How to Draw For Kids
Fashion Design
📍 Drawing Fashion Design for kids
As simple as it gets, this book has over 50 ideas for dresses, each with a pre-drawn mannequin figure, and encourages practice and personal creativity while developing an eye for form, flow, and beauty.
Fashion Sketchbook with Figure Templates for Kids
An intermediate fashion design book for kids, with nice illustrations and simple text and tons of ideas and inspiration.
Fashion Design for Kids: Skill-Building Activities
This advanced book teaches not just the look, flow, and feel of fashion but, along the way, helps your older kid master human shape and proportions, shading, detail and texture, light and shadow, and a lot more – and still, it’s remarkably simple and...
Fashion Drawing: Step-by-Step Illustrations
Science Fiction and Fantasy
📍 Drawing Monsters And Sci-Fi
A very basic book that introduces the most simple drawing concepts and techniques in a way that your kids will love and find delightful.
How to Draw Monsters for Kids Ages 6-9
A fun and interesting book that is as good at developing your child’s imagination as it is at teaching techniques and encouraging practice.
Beginner's Guide to Sketching: Robots & Sci-fi
A fascinating book that not only brilliantly teaches more advanced concepts but also brings the mind and creative process to embrace complex stories and relationships and to connect visuals and narrative more organically.
How to Draw Sci-Fi Utopias & Dystopias
Best Drawing Books for Beginners
📍For Beginners
A fun and positive primer on learning to draw that stresses than anybody can draw, and everybody has hidden artistic talent – a wonderful book and a great place to start.
You Can Draw in 30 Days: Fun, Easy Way
This highly popular book focuses on technique, down to the most basic strokes and movements, in order to not just teach but encourage you with great results quickly – this book really does lead to beautiful and very realistic renderings in a short ti...
Drawing for the Absolute Beginner: Clear Guide
Both a great beginner’s drawing book and a way to naturally and effectively reach higher levels and make your drawings more realistic and advanced.
Big Book of Realistic Drawing Secrets
Best Drawing Books for Intermediate Artists
📍General Drawing Techniques
A true classic, Speed’s book takes a unique approach in balancing absolute understanding of all basic techniques and the technical aspects of drawing against the artist’s own personal vision.
The Practice and Science of Drawing (Dover)
One of the very best and most complete books on basic drawing skills, The Art of Basic Drawing covers basic forms, objects, scenes, people and wildlife, along the way teaching many invaluable tricks and techniques and helping you develop your artisti...
Walter Foster The Art of Basic Drawing Book
A book that I know mostly through recommendations from others, Barber’s illustrated Fundamentals of Drawing is praised for its completeness, its clear descriptions of both concepts and techniques, and how it helps you understand what drawing is all a...
The Fundamentals of Drawing: Complete Course
An advanced primer on pencil drawing, Rines’ book offers advice and techniques which can prove equally applicable to other media, traditional or digital, as well.
A Better Approach to Pencil Drawing
Another true classic, and one of the most widely known and beloved of all art instruction books, How to Draw What You See has been a best-seller for fifty years and a blessing for all sorts of visual artists.
How to Draw What You See
Human Figure and Anatomy
This is arguably the most complete and accurate life drawing reference for any artist who really wants to see how a human body is put together, how it occupies space and how it moves.
Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist
A less detailed and exhaustive reference than the Atlas mentioned above, Hampton’s brilliant book on figure drawing, focuses more on the actual techniques you can use to translate deep understanding of human anatomy and structure into actual drawing.
Figure Drawing: Design and Invention
Andrew Loomis’ figure drawing books are some of the best books you can wish for as an artist! It is beautifully made and it will teach you to draw figures, gesture drawing in a simple and straightforward way.
Drawing the Head, Hands & Figure (Box Set)
Perspective, Space and Relationships
An incredibly simple book, covering one of the most important of all aspects of drawing, Perspective Made Easy is a masterpiece of repetitive drawing exercises, clear explanation and complete coverage of this crucial subject.
Perspective Made Easy (Dover Art Instruction)
One of the most complete books available for teaching perspective, Montague’s Basic Perspective Drawing is written in a clear, friendly manner from a true authority in the field.
Basic Perspective Drawing: A Visual Approach
Pen and Ink Drawing
The cover of this classic tome, its 60th Anniversary Edition newly edited by Susan Meyer, claims that this is “the most comprehensive book ever published on the subject of ink drawing,” and there is no doubt in my mind this is true.
Rendering in Pen and Ink: Classic Techniques
Shorter and more concise than Guptill’s exhaustive primer, this delightful book covers every aspect of pen and ink drawing with real clarity, and has in a short time become one of the most beloved and well-reviewed art books available.
Pen and Ink Drawing: A Simple Guide
Nature and Landscape
Like the human anatomy books above, Knight’s Animal Drawing: Anatomy and Action for Artists provides a deep understanding of the way animals are put together, how they move and how they appear in the world.
Animal Drawing: Anatomy and Action for Artists
This beautiful book teaches how to accurately draw plants, flowers, vines and leaves, but from the slightly different viewpoint of an illustrator.
Botanical Line Drawing: 200 Step-by-Step Plants
Learning landscape drawing, as well as a great work for learning drawing in general, applicable to pretty much any subject matter.
Essential Techniques of Landscape Drawing