This was a basic drawing book. I didn’t gain anything from it, but I wouldn’t have from any other drawing book if you wanted this to be your starter drawing book but it’s a good place to start but it didn’t have anything extra or extraordinary about it.

I liked this book a lot. It provided easy though detailed explanation regarding the topic of drawing people. As a beginner in drawing, I appreciated all the detailed explanations and techniques.

The authors do an excellent job breaking down the steps for drawing each person. They take a complicated subject matter and make if less intimidation with easy to follow steps.

Excellent book on how to draw people -- which is a very hard subject! -- but not for the beginner. This gives next-level advice for artists who want to build on their skills. To really learn how to draw people and have them resemble the subject, use this book!

This was an excellent book on drawing people. The author suggested effective exercises on contour drawing, blind drawing, and gesture drawing. Debra provides a wide variety of reference photos and step by step instructions on how to draw them. She provides a great variety of expressions, nationalities, and ages to practice your drawing skills.

Debra explains how to use a grid to get your proportions correct and the common rules of how to draw a face.

She also provided details instructions on how to develop your composition. Her ideas were back up by illustrations of good compositions and compositions that need improvement.

I highly recommend this book to anyone wishing to improve their drawing skills.

I received this galley from NetGalley.

Thank you Netgalley for a review copy of this book.

This book is very complex and I would not recommend to anyone starting out with drawing. The techniques are explained but do not go into detail or give clear step by step instructions. However, if you are an artist with some experience i should imagine it would be of some help.

"The Art of Drawing People," by Debra Kauffman Yaun, William F. Powell, Diane Cardaci, and Walter Foster is a very in-depth tutorial on drawing people. It takes a step-by-step approach to deconstructing what drawing a person requires and helps walk the artist through the process.

There is so much good information here. It is an essential book on any portrait artist's bookshelf. There is so much to learn if each "lesson" is absorbed at a gradual pace. I definitely recommend this very helpful book on drawing people.

I received this eBook free of charge from Quarto Publishing Group – Walter Foster Publishing via NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review. I did not receive any fiscal compensation from either company for this review and the opinions expressed herein are entirely my own.

Great book with lots of useful instruction. Well set out with plenty of drawings to make it easy to read and find what you're looking for. A few of the examples seemed to be a little old fashioned, perhaps it is an older book republished? A comprehensive book on learning to draw people

Four artists give comprehensive instructions on drawing heads, hands and bodies. Details for perspective, proportion, technics and use of drawing pencils are given in great detail. I recommend this book for beginning artists.

I'm always looking for new books on how to draw people, as it is the hardest subject for me. While this book didn't wildly differ from others, I did find a lot of good simplified tips that did make it different for me, anyway. I'm glad I got a chance to review it and will post a review on Amazon shortly.

The Art of Drawing People is a wonderfully helpful book perfect for beginner or more experienced artists. The book includes information regarding tools needed, shading, proportions and breaks down the techniques to draw individual parts of the face and body. There are step-by-step pictures plus written explanations. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in learning more about drawing the face or body of people of any age.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC! The opinions in this review are honest and my own. #TheArtOfDrawingPeople #drawing #art #nonfiction #create

Overall, I found the book to be full of examples but lacking in detail. I appreciated the page on establishing guidelines since it labeled the half- and quarter- points at which different lines go. I would have appreciated it if these ratios could have been labeled explicitly in more of the trainings to help the reader practice using them. Something that the book did well was including examples of portraits with a variety of ages and skin tones. It's a fine book with plenty of technique, but I think that many beginning artists will need much more practice between sections than is currently implied by book's length.

This is a helpful little book for anyone who wishes to improve their people drawing skills. It’s got some handy tips and some good references.

Thank you to Netgalley for the Advanced Reader's Copy of this book. I received this in exchange for my honest review.

I found this book to be very informative for a beginner. However, as an artist myself, I didn’t find anything in the book that made it stand out from the other hundreds of “how to draw” books that I have invested an abundance of my time in. Like other how to draw books, the materials are broken down and steps are broken down so they are easily followed and beginners can easily refer back to in each of their future pieces of work.

his is another of those step-by-step books which approaches art from the lowest common denominator, under the assumption that all prospective artists are the same, at the same level, with the same skills and interests. There was nothing new there, and the art was competent enough, but the questions which bothered me about it were two-fold. One was: what does this book teach that a score of others like it do not, and I could find no worthy answer to that.

The other question was why is the book so larded with images of women? Are men so worthy of depicting? Surely what's sketch for the goose is sketch for the gander? If it had not been for the appalling gender-bias in the art and the limited range exhibited in the various depictions of figures, then I might have favored this book somewhat more, but as it was, I cannot commend it as a worthy read.

This is a pretty standard drawing book. If you’ve seen any Walter Forest books, you probably have an idea of what to expect. They use pretty standard methods to teach you the basics of drawing. This one is focused on drawing people, I’d say the main emphasis in on faces, but it covers the whole body. It teaches you the differences to look out for with different ages, skin tons, hair, etc. There is a decent balance between text and pictures. I wouldn’t call it a step by step kind of instructional book, more like tips needed start practicing drawing people on your own, in your own styles.

Sections in this book:

- Getting Started. This covers the basic tools, basic pencil techniques, learning to see what you’re drawing, composition and perspective, and beginning portraiture.

- Basic heads and faces. This covers using basic lines, establishing guidelines, front view, profile, three-quarter view, mature faces, and young faces.

- Realistic Portraits. This covers adult facial proportions, the planes of the face, adult facial features, drawing from a snapshot, drawing what you see, capturing personality, working with lighting, including a background, portrait in profile, and developing hair.

- Drawing the body, This section covers showing movement, foreshortening, hands, feet, lighting a subject, life drawing, and occasion portrait.

- Drawing children. This covers children’s facial proportions, portraying children’s features, choosing a photo reference, drawing a baby, capturing details, establishing values, children’s body proportions, children in action, and choosing a pose.

* Disclaimer: I received this book at no cost in order to review it. I offered no guarantee of a positive review, though I only request books I think I’ll like because why read a book you think you’ll hate?

This had some nice examples, but didn’t really expand my general knowledge for drawing people that I’ve been able to find through other sources. I like that I’ve added this to my library, but nothing truly groundbreaking was in the book.

I paint in oils and have a few instructional books on drawing. This book is easy to navigate and the easy to follow directions and illustrations couldn’t be better. There are illustrations for every age group which will be very helpful for my purposes.

This is a great gift for someone else, or yourself! Many of us want to draw better, and our drawings would help us in our creative endeavors, but it can be intimidating to get started. This book gives you the basics in easy pieces--usually just 1-2 pages--so that you don't feel overwhelmed. I found I was seeing everyone's face differently after reading the book! I plan to continue to use the techniques to practice my drawing skills.

Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the digital ARC.

The Art of Drawing People is a new tutorial guide for portraiture in the form of mini classes for various parts of drawing a human subject. Due out 3rd Sept 2019 from Quarto on their Walter Foster Jr imprint, it's 128 pages and will be available in paperback format.

The first ~20% of the page content is an introductory chapter introducing the tools, materials, and concepts for human portraiture. The authors cover the choice of materials and how to use them, learning to translate what you actually see to the page, a little bit of composition theory, some perspective studies, and troubleshooting potential problems using the example of characteristic ratios in a child's face.

At each lesson, important points and potential problems are highlighted in sidebars along with clear illustrations of the points being discussed. The book is lavishly illustrated. The chapters following the introduction cover heads and faces from different viewpoints, general portraiture including drawing from a reference photo and highlights and realistic hair, lighting, and more. There are also lessons on full body portraiture and a special treatment of children.

Nearly all of the tutorials have multiple illustrations which contrast the steps from outline sketch through contour and shading. I do not personally feel that this is a beginner guide though there are certainly lessons which can be used by artists of all levels of expertise. This would be more suitable to the mid-level to advanced artist looking for more specific study in portraiture. I liked that the art styles shown in the book come from several different artists, showing a range of styles. I also appreciate that there are numerous different treatments of light and shading at different positions from full face forward to three quarter profile to full profile.

This would make a great support and resource text for classroom or library settings, and also for the artist's (or would be artist's) home library.

Four stars.