Breakfast of Champions - A Guidebook for Nature Artists

Book: Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut

Genre: Instructional

Themes: Art, nature

Comps: The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross, The Artist's Guide to Drawing Realistic Animals, How to Draw SUPER SAIYAN Aura in Sketchbook Pro

Representative quote: "A beaver was actually a large rodent. It loved water, so it built dams."

Page: 23

No audience may be more ripe for the picking than the aspiring artist. When it comes to gaining skill and developing style, there is no substitute for practice, practice, and more practice. Thus it is that the world is filled with books and videos which purport to replace the need for hundreds of hours of practice with one simple purchase of $9.99 or more. Why work when you can have someone tell you about how they worked? Why even bother reading about how someone else worked, when having the book on your bookshelf displays your artistic soul to the world at large (or at least the subset of the large world which you invite into your home, or meet while carrying said book, perhaps on the bus, in a park, or while out at lunch)?

Yes, one mustn't disregard the value of real instruction. The baby of a true student-master conference should not be thrown out with the bathwater of static, one-size-fits-all, generic advice. One can learn, in person, valuable lessons when they are targeted at specific strengths and weaknesses. But a book cannot provide such tutelage.

And yet somehow the world is full of these books. Among the throngs of bland, soulless, sucker-bait for the hopeful wannabe, some few have inevitably risen to the top. Breakfast of Champions is one of those, buoyed perhaps by the author's notorious sense of humor, or conceivably hoisted by that keen word, "Champions," which preys on the hopes of the fledgling artist.

The book itself seems to focus on animals of an aquatic nature, prime among them beavers, trout, and some unrecognized critter called a "dwayne." We did not observe it, but understand the author also has a penchant for repeatedly drawing stylized starfish, displayed as an asterisk like so: *. His other drawings are in a similar style derived from heavy ink, with thick, bold strokes, in a highly simplified fashion. Frankly, they are not good. The beaver appears sickly--furless, stricken with speckles, and befanged. Below that, a smoking candle flame (candle not depicted) is so abstract as to be nearly unintelligible. Despite its reputation, it is with a heavy heart we must designate this book as deserving to be in history's dust bin, best ignored and quickly forgotten.

Final Rating: 1/5 bookmarks.