By Lee J. Ames
Fifty animals, each built up in about eight numbered steps: light shapes first, the finished animal drawn over the top, then you erase the shapes underneath.
One animal to a page. Each one comes in about eight numbered steps, and the first few are barely there: a light oval for the body, a smaller one for the head, a curved line for the back. Then the finished horse gets drawn over those shapes, and you erase everything underneath it. There are fifty in all — a lion, a giraffe, a shark, a penguin, a rabbit, a dinosaur, an elephant. Almost no words, nothing to read. Lee Ames drew for Disney early in his career and then spent his life teaching this one method, and the book has been in print in some form since the 1970s.
It's built for the child who's past being pleased with any old drawing and now wants the horse to look like a real horse. What Ames teaches is construction drawing, shrunk down: block in the shapes, check the proportions against the model, draw the animal over the top, erase your working lines. Nothing's softened for a young hand, and that cuts both ways. A younger child may get four steps in, see that their fifth line is nowhere near the printed one, and shut the book, because the distance between the step on the page and the paper in front of them is more than they can close yet. Somewhere around eight or nine, when a child can hold a pencil lightly and compare their line to a model without giving up, it starts to click.