This gave me a few new tips and tricks on how to easily draw and shade faces. I'm not a beginner, by any means, but I'm always looking for new ways of drawing and shading. Thanks so much!

A really nice book for budding artists. It's a great reference guide to have on hand, in the classroom or studio and can help you build confidence when you're not sure about the best techniques or formula for realistic faces, something that gives a lot of us artist's block and the fear sets in!

Beautiful illustrations and step by steps to demonstrate examples.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to preview this book for a review.

Good solid reference to draw faces. I anticipated a little more in-depth, but this book is a good starting point to draw better faces. The key is to practice, practice, practice!

Even though it's quite a short book (40 pages), there is a good number of images to work with.

It provide information on tools, materials and shading techniques to start you off. It then moves onto showing adult and children proportions and features. It is then followed by 4 more sections on profiles, frontal view, three-quarter view and other angles.

A good book for a beginner starting out with drawing faces using a pencil. I like the way it shows the different features and gives steps on how to draw them.

I received this book from Netgalley in return for a honest review.

Do you want to be successful in drawing the human face?
The book "Drawing: Faces. Learn to Draw step by step" is based on the work of Walter Foster. The important statement in the introduction points out the goal of this book: "The qualities of individual faces, as well as the emotions they convey, make them some of the most fascinating subjects to draw. And becoming comfortable with drawing the face will give you the confidence to go on to draw the full human figure." The book is one of the 40-page books from the "Drawing ... step by step" series, published by Quarto Publishing Group - Walter Foster. The ten chapters can be divided into two blocks: 1) tools & materials and shading techniques and 2) proportions (of adults and children), features (of adults and children), profiles, and different views.
The book presents itself with great graphics and design and is very detailed in its step-by-step approach. Tips that help with the drawing are included throughout the book. They are a great help for the budding artist. It is helpful and inspirational for beginning (and advanced) artists who are wanting to draw with graphite pencils. It would make a nice gift and I would recommend it for them. Readers need to be aware that it is a basic book, index and information where the needed materials can be bought are missing. Furthermore all the drawings are done with graphite pencil, drawing with colored pencils are not included in the book.
The complimentary copy of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley free of charge. I was under no obligation to offer a positive review. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.
#DrawingFaces #NetGalley

Drawing: Faces: Learn to draw step by step is a book in the Learn to Draw Step by Step series. Due out 3rd March 2020 from Quarto on their Walter Foster imprint, it's 40 pages and available in paperback format. This appears to be a reformat and re-release (excerpt?) of material first released in 1997 with the same title by the same author.

The titles in this series are all formatted in a similar manner and this one is no exception.

A short general introduction (10%) covers tools and materials including pencils, paper, blending tools, etc. The intro is followed by a group of non-specific tutorials on graphite techniques, shading, light, shapes and perspective. The following tutorial chapters are specific for different subjects (mostly faces) and include specific anatomy: eyes, noses, etc, leading to some full studies. There is also a very abbreviated tutorial on rendering some surfaces and finishes. It should be noted that the style of these renderings is very retro/traditional in a style which was popular in the early to mid 20th century, much of that popularity springing from the art of Mr. Foster himself.

I like these tutorial booklets, they're inexpensive and full of useful info for artists looking for improvement in their own work. It's nice to see them getting a re-release for a new audience of artists and learners.

Four stars - for what it covers and for a very short tutorial guide, it does the job admirably well.

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.

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.

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.