Drawing: Faces

Note: After being so perplexed by how out of date the faces were, I looked at the "about the author" text on the cover and found out the author died in 1981 at the age of 90. This is apparently a new book using his sketches, which explains a lot. I'm leaving my original review as follows since it will help determine if this is a good book for you.

This is a good basic drawing book to learn how to pretty easily draw faces but it is straight out of the 1940's and 1950's in terms of the faces. It's almost comical how out of date these people are. Think Leave it to Beaver and black and white private detective movies. All of the subjects are thin, white, conventionally attractive looking folks with trim haircuts, ties, fedoras, bows in their hair, etc. other than one black child who looks like he's wearing a newsboy cap and a few older folks (one might be Mother Teresa?). The only man who looks non-white reminds me of a villainous foreigner cliche of an old Man From U.N.C.L.E. episode. Makeup is minimal on women -- again, think of the stereotypical housewife or secretary from the 50's and you'll get the idea.

The book is in black and white with the exception of colorful boxes of text. It is 40 pages in total.

This will be a good primer on drawing faces with scale lines and such. It shows alternate angles and a variety of old fashioned hairstyles. You'll need to look elsewhere for diversity of models, body size variations, or modern makeup, hair, hat and dress styles.

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for the purpose of review.

Drawing Faces was a mixed bag for me. The introductory pages are sound, with useful information on things like proportion and shading. However, this is a heritage text, and as such the example giving look very dated, which may be off-putting for some readers. The style for portraiture has changed somewhat since these pieces were first drawn, which makes them feel a little irrelevant now. In conclusion, I am giving this book 3 stars. It has some good information, so beginners may want to check it out, but be aware that the style of the examples may not be to everyone's taste.

I received an advanced reader copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review via netgalley and the publishers.

This is a great starter book for learning to draw faces with useful information and tips. I will refer back to this book when I attempt the facial sketches within it.
A good book for if your starting out learning to draw faces as not overloading or too challenging.

Good basic step by step book on drawing faces. It is a good study although the projects are very out of date and remind me of the pictures in old ladybird books.. Its not one of the best in this series but there I some really good information to refer to when doing portraits. It is a short reference book that would be useful to beginner/intermediate portrait artists to dip into now and again for a bit of help on a specific feature.

Drawings aestethically outdated (remembers the Bridgman books), but very essential and useful information for beginning pencil portrait artists. Adult and child features explained, profile and 3/4 views, planes of the face, shading techniques, a hint to perspective applied to human faces.

This book is short but informative. The drawings are excellent and the instructions on shading on facial features is very good. Highly recommend this book. I received this book from NetGalley for an honest review.

This instructional book for drawing faces is an excellent beginner's guide for getting the hang of the subtlety of drawing features and proportions. It includes a few pages of basic instruction on sketching tools and techniques, which is a good place to start for an artist who has never had any previous instruction about drawing methods like shading. The book also spends a lot of time on getting the proportions of the facial features right and the guidelines of where to draw each feature, which is a useful guide for artists just starting with drawing faces.

However, for the artist who has drawn faces before and is looking for more instruction to improve their art, the book is limited. It's short and mainly focuses on basic technique, though I still found some of the tips helpful. it has several tips about drawing the suggestions of features instead of drawing them in full detail, which is something I still struggle to do.

My main problem was that the book has very little opportunity to practice, very little exercise within it. Each instructional focus page has only a couple of examples that it works through in large leaps instead of steps, which might be difficult for an absolute beginner to follow. It also provides little practice with shading faces, which is another weak point of mine.

This is a decent guide for a beginner at drawing faces, but it is somewhat limited by focusing on tips rather than step-by-step instruction. However, the tips are still often useful to those building or refining their craft.