Lessons for Young Artists
  • Published: 7 October 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241692813
  • Imprint: Particular Books
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $45.00

Lessons for Young Artists

Formats & editions
Hardback
7 Oct 2025
EBook
3 Jul 2025
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A master hands over his tools in this generous, gentle book of artistic advice

We are all artists as children, painting and drawing each day. Most of us stop when we get older – but David Gentleman kept going. For over ninety years he has been drawing, painting, engraving and printing, rising to become one of Britain’s best-known and most loved artists. His watercolours have filled galleries; his iconic wood cuts are emblazoned across posters, book jackets and train stations; his stamps have made their way to the furthest corners of the world.

Here, the great, polymathic artist and craftsman shares what he has learned over the course of a lifetime of making and thinking about art. Unlike his contemporaries, Gentleman was never a teacher; his lessons are a sequence of unconventional prompts and reflections that will deepen how you think about art and the world around you.


Sincere, practical and unpretentious, Gentleman’s insights are a breath of fresh air. Here are new ways to focus, notice the world and cultivate your own style; techniques to evolve your work, from playing with time to painting in bad weather; methods for getting the most out of mistakes and negative criticism; and, above all, reminders to return, always, to the simple delights of creativity.
  • Published: 7 October 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241692813
  • Imprint: Particular Books
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $45.00
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Praise for Lessons for Young Artists

Lessons for Young Artists is anything but a how-to manual or didactic textbook. Instead, it’s like a visit to David Gentleman’s studio where you sit at his shoulder, watching him work, while he shares tips, wisdom, anecdotes … Finding beauty in the neglected, unnoticed moments that pass us by is a lesson that can be applied to anyone’s life, ‘Young Artist’ or not. This is diamond advice, lightly given

Jonathan Jones, Guardian

Gentleman distils more than seven packed decades into an inspiring primer for the hobbyist and art school graduate alike

Susie Mesure, Financial Times

A richly wise book about how to live a creative life in a world full of distractions and false goals … the book could equally be called Advice for Living Well

Irish Times

A wonderful guide to practising art … Gentleman’s advice is simple and doable … The lessons are brought home with his own work. Some of his rules could be for life as well as for art

Evening Standard

Gentleman has been responsible for some of the most-seen public artworks in this country, from more than 100 commissioned stamp designs, through the illlustrations in the astonishingly popular 1957 cookery book Plays du Jour, to a platform-length mural at Charing Cross Underground Station (passed through bya whopping 60,000 passengers a day)

The Times

It takes a special kind of person to hit their 10th decade and still see fresh beauty in the city they’ve called home for 70 years

i News

Gentleman, more than anyone else, was responsible for demonstrating the possibilities of the postage stamp, a tiny shard of visual pleasure and interest that could make art a natural accompaniment to the everyday act of communication for millions of people

Apollo

It would be tempting to describe Gentleman as a pillar of the British establishment were it not for his anti-establishment leanings … For decades he has been working steadily as a designer-illustrator in a tradition of his own making

Eye Magazine

David Gentleman is London's visual laureate

Quentin Blake

David has spent a lifetime depicting with wit and affection a London he has made his own

Alan Bennett
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