Art Studio: Faces & Features

I really liked looking through this book, as I love drawing faces and this book gave me a lot of good tips to improve. It's nice that they first explain the materials they use and present different techniques you can use, before the step-by-step explanations start. The instructions and comments were always easy to understand and try out yourself and I think that with the help of this book, everyone can learn how to draw portraits using different styles.

Lots of great information here for building your skills in drawing and painting facial features. Examples cover a wide age range of models as well as various mediums. This would be a good fit for anyone wanting to improve their portrait skills.

Thank you to Quarto Publishing Group – Walter Foster and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book. All comments are my own, unbiased opinion.

This is a tardis of a book and packs a lots useful information and different techniques Between it’s pages. A must for anyone wishing to create a beautiful and accomplished portraits.

Art Studio: Faces and Features is a wonderful introductory guide for artists. I love the way the book covers not only general thoughts on facial anatomy and shading but also the different techniques needed to work on portraits in various media. It provides an excellent overview so you can try out diverse techniques and styles to see what suits you best. As a graphite artist, I found the section on pencil drawing most interesting, and I especially loved the pages on how to draw hair, as that is something with which I still struggle in my portraits. I would recommend this book for amateur artists who are still deciding which medium they wish to pursue and wish to see their options, and for portrait artists in any media who are looking to improve their technique.

Excellent book containing useful information for beginners (and not only) about how to draw and paint the face with various techniques (graphite, pastel, oil and acrylic, watercolour). The chapter with pencil drawing demos has been taken from Lance Richlin's Lifelike heads (book published by the same editor) that I already own. High quality artwork, excellent teachers showing in simple steps how to do them. I appreciate these series that offer access to valuable art intruction in a very attractive way.

I thought this book contained a lot of useful information. Shows good techniques and worth having at hand if you are artistic and would like to improve on drawing real people.

#ArtStudioFacesFeatures #NetGalley

This book can be used in the classroom or at home. The Art Studio contains a balanced mix of technical and practical workshops which make a good book companion for observation classes.

“Drawing and painting heads, faces, and expressions can be an intimidating prospect for a beginning artist. Art Studio: Faces & Features is here to help, with more than 50 tips, techniques, and step-by-step projects that will have you creating expressive faces and mastering textures in all your drawings.”

This is a fantastic step-by-step guide for the budding artist to follow along their path to artistic self discovery.

It starts off taking you through a full chapter of Portrait Techniques, including shading, proportions, anatomy and identifying planes along the face.

You are then guided through multiple step-by-step projects with the medium of your choice! You are shown graphite pencil, oil & acrylic, watercolour and pastel. All of which are easy and simple to follow guides.

I am looking forward to sitting down with this book and undertaking these wonderful projects and brushing up on my techniques!

*thank you to NetGalley and Walter Foster Creative Team for providing an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This colorful book describes basic techniques for drawing and painting faces and features in different mediums (pencil, oil, acrylic, watercolor, pastel). The techniques are described with step by step images and are very easy to follow.
I received a copy of this book from Quarto Publishing Group – Walter Foster

I feel like there are two types of drawing/painting books. Step by step or reference. Step by step are better for those of us who struggle to draw anything to our liking while reference tends to be more helpful for those with established skills.

This book is firmly in the reference category and generally there’s nothing new in those, just different ways of presenting the same information. This book does set itself apart though because it’s not just about drawing faces or just about creating faces with watercolors or just about creating faces with pastels, etc. This one covers a bit of every major medium. So if you usually draw in pencils but suddenly get an urge to try oils or acrylics? This book is probably for you. You already have the basics down on your preferred pencil medium, but getting something right with a brush or palette knife? You might find what you need here.. Some of the sections and tips are more helpful than others, but for the basics on faces and features in different mediums, this is a good start. Especially if you’re not sure what medium you want to try. There’s just enough here to give you a feel for whether or not that’s what you’re in the mood to try.

This book explorers drawing human faces in graphite pencil, oil and acrylic, watercolor, and pastel. They started by talking about the tools, materials, and techniques used in different mediums (though this is more a definition of terms than teaching a beginner how to use the medium). Since so many mediums are covered, none are talked about in depth. They then talked about facial anatomy, proportions, and how to draw the various features on the face. There were many tips about common errors that would be useful for anyone having trouble making realistic faces.

They then gave step-by-step demonstrations of drawing several portraits in each medium (graphite, oil and acrylic, watercolor, and pastel) and included many different types of faces (baby, child, adult, old, male, female, plus different skin tones and hair types). The instructions were basically what colors the artist used and what order they did the features. The graphite pencil section was the most useful, in my opinion. They did provide some tips specific to drawing portraits in each medium. This book would probably be most useful to an artist who is interested in drawing portraits but who has not yet settled on a medium that they prefer.

I found this book very interesting, as not only did it explain the different steps and information of the formation of a face, but explained about lighting.
The part of the book I really like was the different effects, method and results in using pencil, acrylic, oils, watercolour and pastels. Each technique has different examples and they are very well explained and illustrated.
I particularly like the information on anatomy and proportions.
There is a lot to like in this book, and a lot to learn for the beginner or someone that want to try something different with their art.

As with most art books, this book starts with an explanation of materials and color theory. A unique feature was the chart on techniques for oil, acrylic, pastels, and watercolor. It is a great reference for future projects such as landscape and still life, the chart is not just helpful for portraits.

I have read a lot of portrait books that show how the typical facial proportions are plotted out. This book as unique with using skulls to demonstrate the features you need to be sure to get accurately. One tip on drawing hair was to think of it as a helmet as opposed to individual strands or a mass with texture. The author's suggestion made me much more successful in painting hair, which was something I had struggled with in the past.

Because the finished drawings are so advanced I think this book would be beneficial to an advanced artist as well as a beginner. My drawings did not turn out nearly as good as the finished portraits in the book but I did learn a lot through the process and saw progress in my work.

I highly recommend this book to a beginning or advanced artist.

I received this galley from NetGalley.

Another excellent art technique book by Quarto Publishing! Like other books in the Walter Foster series this book begins by listing the art tools and materials used to draw and paint portraits, followed by the theory and techniques needed to understand how to build (for the lack of a better word) a face. The next section covers pencil drawing techniques from laying down a flat shape to using techniques such as hatching, shading and blending to transform a flat 2-D shape into a 3D representation The following section addresses a variety of color techniques for watercolor, oil, acrylic and pastel. The main section of the book begins with the foundations of good portraiture - anatomy, light and shadow, proportion of the head overall, then address individual features - eyes, nose, ears, mouth, etc., The remainder of the book shows how to apply this foundational knowledge to create black and white, and color portraits. One element that is not addressed is expression, but there are other art books that cover this ground. This book is another valuable addition to an artist's library. Highly recommended!

A good tool for those who want to know tricks and tips when learning to draw faces. The instructions are clear and well illustrated.

This book suits well if you like drawing/ painting portraits and would like to explore different mediums. It has some basic instructions about how to draw faces, color theory and explanations about tools & materials, but what makes this book special is that it explains how to approach portrait painting using watercolors, pencils, acrylics, oils and pastels.
Each medium has it's own techniques and ways to achieve certain effect, so even if you know how to draw a portrait, lets say, using colored pencils, these tutorials can help you transition to a different medium like for example, watercolors, which will behave very differently to your well-known pencils. It can also help if you want to try different options before settling for an specific medium. It has nice and simple explanations and tips, which are usually given through step-by step projects. It includes different faces: baby, kid, teen, adult and elderly, different skin tones and hair types (distributed across the different mediums, not all varieties are shown for each medium). I would recommend it to the adventurous artist who wants to explore different mediums and needs a reference guide to start the journey . *I read this book as an eARC

A good resource book for artists, which covers pencil drawing, oil, acrylic, watercolours and pastels. It begins with the basics of colour theory, mediums and materials. The information about the facial anatomy is very good, showing the planes and angles of the face, followed by more details on each facial feature. Next come step by step demonstrations using a good range of models from baby to elderly person. I found it really useful as it covers such a range, and great for the budding artist who wishes to try different mediums.
Many thanks to the publisher for a review copy.