Basic Visual Concepts And Principles For Artists, Architects And Designers

by Charles Wallschlaeger, Cynthia Busic-Snyder

Book by Wallschlaeger, Charles, Busic-Snyder, Cynthia

Genres: Design, Art, Architecture, Reference

544 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1992

Reviews

[Glenn Davis · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am a retired structural engineer, and a retired college professor where I worked 10 years full time as the Program Director for Architectural Technology. Today, I am a full time teaching artist at a local museum and cultural arts center. As for the book: The Title and Table of Contents caught my interest years ago. The book however, is very outdated in many ways. The photos need to be replaced with something more up to date. Most community college students would never attempt to read this book. It is perhaps, too good with regard to content. Lots of information but probably too compact. Having said that, the section on perspective is superficial. My students were required to use a plan and elevation view, and create a perspective from any point in space. It is doubtful that this skill is important now since students rely heavily on programs such as SketchUp to create the same thing without having to think. But, you don't include any computer related material. We stopped teaching pencil drawing in 2005. Many practicing artists seem to be happy living in the 14th century and experimenting rather than acquiring knowledge from reading. The more contemporary artist make up their own rules. You also must introduce the new color wheel with cyan, magenta, and yellow primaries and red, green and blue secondaries.... all brought on by the computer age. It is more digitally accurate than Newtons but consistent with it. Newton's wheel compresses the blues and expands the reds. Artist think nothing of it because there are more red pigments, but they tend to supplement their limited pallette with brilliant purples and greens stating that the ones mixed from primaries are too dull. They are dull because they are not using the most neutral primaries, which are cyan, magenta, and neutral yellow. The book reads like it was originally written in the 50's and has had some minimal updating. For today's students it is DOA. If you force them to dig the material out of the book, they will fail the course. I find it useful for improving my own understanding and relating it in the classroom. The book needs to be completely rewritten and with all new figures. I wondering what the publisher is thinking. I do recognize and appreciate the amount of research someone did to put this work together in one volume.

[Jennifer Cheuk · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book has tons of information, that being said, it's presented in a really dry format. I did do some of the exercises in the book though and found those quite interesting.