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The Two-Pencil Method: The Revolutionary Approach to Drawing It All
From the best-selling artist and YouTube art instructor, this book features step-by-step lessons that show you how to draw professional-quality portraits, landscapes, travel sketches, and animals using only two ordinary pencils.
Great art doesn't have to be expensive. For the cost of a regular graphite writing pencil and an equally ordinary black colored pencil, you can create drawings worthy of framing and displaying. In this straightforward, aspiring artist's guide to rendering a variety of popular subjects with only two pencils, artist and art instructor Mark Crilley presents a direct, approachable, and achievable method for drawing just about anything. The Two-Pencil Method breaks down Crilley's techniques across six chapters of five lessons each. In each lesson, you'll learn how the two-pencil method can add depth and shading, allowing you to create bold and distinctive drawings that go beyond mere sketchbook doodles. The book moves from a primer on drawing basics to step-by-step examples of still lifes, landscapes, animals, travel sketches, and portraits. With each chapter, Crilley's confident and encouraging voice and expert insights demonstrate how to achieve stunning artistic results from the simplest of art materials.
- GenresArtDrawingNonfiction
159 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 18, 2018
56 people are currently reading
84 people want to read
About the author
Mark Crilley
116 books370 followersMark Crilley is an American comic book creator and children's book author/illustrator. He is the creator of Miki Falls, Akiko, and Brody's Ghost. He is also noted for his instructional videos for drawing in the manga-style. Crilley distributes drawing advice to artists via YouTube videos and his DeviantArt account. In August 2010, he starred in some how to draw videos for Funimation on demand. Mark Crilley's wife is Miki Crilley who he named Miki Falls after. The two have a daughter, Mio, and a son, Matthew.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Cri...
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 22, 2018
A lively guide!
Firstly Wow! How creative is this artist! Apart from his drawings, I really enjoyed Crilley's presentation and helpful ideas demonstrated throughout this rather interesting guide to drawing.
I loved his no nonsense approach to finding the right pencil. The feng shui aesthetic if you will!
"And when you find that pencil, whether it’s the crème de la crème of the art store or a simple writing pencil sold in packs of twenty, stick with it. That’s your pencil. That’s the one that works for you."
The practical no nonsense advice is well worth following, particularly if just using as few as tools as possible to draw with interests you. I know that when traveling I only take a few pencils and a small drawing pad. Now I'll reduce those accoutrements even further! Just two will do!
A NetGalley ARC
Firstly Wow! How creative is this artist! Apart from his drawings, I really enjoyed Crilley's presentation and helpful ideas demonstrated throughout this rather interesting guide to drawing.
I loved his no nonsense approach to finding the right pencil. The feng shui aesthetic if you will!
"And when you find that pencil, whether it’s the crème de la crème of the art store or a simple writing pencil sold in packs of twenty, stick with it. That’s your pencil. That’s the one that works for you."
The practical no nonsense advice is well worth following, particularly if just using as few as tools as possible to draw with interests you. I know that when traveling I only take a few pencils and a small drawing pad. Now I'll reduce those accoutrements even further! Just two will do!
A NetGalley ARC
May 3, 2022
This book is a one-trick pony, but that trick is a good one. I'm grateful to know it.
It is not a spoiler to reveal this trick: it's stated upfront in the Goodreads description of the book. The value of the book consists in showing many staged drawings that illustrate just how good this trick is.
The idea is this: you can get full control on the tonal variation needed for your black-on-white drawings by relying on just two inexpensive pencils: a lighter-grade graphite pencil and a black colored pencil (CP). This saves you both time and money.
Even if you have the discretionary cash to acquire a large stable of pencils, switching between pencils during drawing is tedious. (I don't know how CP artists don't go insane with all that pencil switching.) If you could get away with just one pencil by varying how hard you press down on it, you would. But experience teaches you that this isn't enough, so you settle for the next best number: two. Left to myself, I gravitated to two grades of graphite: one hard (light) and one soft (dark).
The genius behind Crilley's trick is that it replaces the darker graphite pencil with a black CP. It trades the erasability of the graphite for the true, matte black of the CP, which won't shine in the metallic way that dark graphite does. This is a very good trade indeed, because you will have started out your drawing with the lighter graphite, and by the time you're ready to darken the relevant portions with CP, you wouldn't really need to erase anything anymore.
Crilley uses a standard No. 2 or HB pencil for his graphite and what looks like a Prismacolor black for his dark. HB pencils have the merit of being ubiquitous, but I have quite a few 2H pencils lying around, and they may be even better. (2H pencils are fairly easy to get too.) It may be more difficult to get a black CP at a good price without purchasing an entire CP set, but it isn't impossible. (The black pencil from a child's abandoned CP pack works nicely, by the way.) Note that the widely available, so-called "ebony" pencils are actually graphite, and won't work if you want a truly matte black. Carbon or charcoal pencils do provide matte black, but they smudge more than CP.
In recent years, Staedtler and Faber-Castell have both come up with matte graphite pencils, so you may be able to use this modified form of graphite for your darker tones after all. Such a pencil should be more erasable than a CP, but, more importantly, it may blend more seamlessly with your lighter-tone pencil, both being graphite. (I don't have a matte graphite pencil yet, so I'm speculating wildly: I suspect a CP would still win out on matteness.) Of course, getting a specialty pencil goes against the "chic miser" aesthetic of the Crilley method, but it's a viable option that was probably not around when this book was written.
It is not a spoiler to reveal this trick: it's stated upfront in the Goodreads description of the book. The value of the book consists in showing many staged drawings that illustrate just how good this trick is.
The idea is this: you can get full control on the tonal variation needed for your black-on-white drawings by relying on just two inexpensive pencils: a lighter-grade graphite pencil and a black colored pencil (CP). This saves you both time and money.
Even if you have the discretionary cash to acquire a large stable of pencils, switching between pencils during drawing is tedious. (I don't know how CP artists don't go insane with all that pencil switching.) If you could get away with just one pencil by varying how hard you press down on it, you would. But experience teaches you that this isn't enough, so you settle for the next best number: two. Left to myself, I gravitated to two grades of graphite: one hard (light) and one soft (dark).
The genius behind Crilley's trick is that it replaces the darker graphite pencil with a black CP. It trades the erasability of the graphite for the true, matte black of the CP, which won't shine in the metallic way that dark graphite does. This is a very good trade indeed, because you will have started out your drawing with the lighter graphite, and by the time you're ready to darken the relevant portions with CP, you wouldn't really need to erase anything anymore.
Crilley uses a standard No. 2 or HB pencil for his graphite and what looks like a Prismacolor black for his dark. HB pencils have the merit of being ubiquitous, but I have quite a few 2H pencils lying around, and they may be even better. (2H pencils are fairly easy to get too.) It may be more difficult to get a black CP at a good price without purchasing an entire CP set, but it isn't impossible. (The black pencil from a child's abandoned CP pack works nicely, by the way.) Note that the widely available, so-called "ebony" pencils are actually graphite, and won't work if you want a truly matte black. Carbon or charcoal pencils do provide matte black, but they smudge more than CP.
In recent years, Staedtler and Faber-Castell have both come up with matte graphite pencils, so you may be able to use this modified form of graphite for your darker tones after all. Such a pencil should be more erasable than a CP, but, more importantly, it may blend more seamlessly with your lighter-tone pencil, both being graphite. (I don't have a matte graphite pencil yet, so I'm speculating wildly: I suspect a CP would still win out on matteness.) Of course, getting a specialty pencil goes against the "chic miser" aesthetic of the Crilley method, but it's a viable option that was probably not around when this book was written.
January 14, 2020
Great book, super useful and specific.
May 3, 2020
Bought it, practiced with it. It's good, author is a great artist. There's not a lot of how to get from there to here. I prefered Alphonso Dunn.
September 5, 2025
great instructional book!
I learned so much from this book. He simplifies the how-to and makes drawing approachable with basic supplies. I highly recommend this book!
I learned so much from this book. He simplifies the how-to and makes drawing approachable with basic supplies. I highly recommend this book!
November 12, 2020
One of the best drawing books I have ever read I found instant progress in my drawing ability
July 28, 2022
Very useful tutorials. The kind of book that would be worth owning to reference multiple times.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews