The Practice and Science of Drawing (1913) by Harold Speed is one of the most admired manuals ever written on the subject, still recommended to art students today. Speed, a portrait painter trained in the academic tradition, distinguishes the disciplined study of form and proportion from the expressive, intuitive side of drawing, and shows how the two must work together.
The book treats line drawing and mass drawing, the rendering of light and shade, and the cultivation of the artist’s perception, illustrated with the author’s own examples. Lucid and humane, it remains a foundational text of art instruction. This free EPUB download is cleanly formatted for any e-reader.