Art Studio: Faces & Features by Walter Foster Creative Team

Art Studio: Faces & Features by Walter Foster Creative Team ISBN-13: 9781633226432 Paperback: 114 pages Publisher: Walter Foster Publishing Released: Nov. 6, 2018

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
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. This intuitive guide shows you how to work with graphite and colored pencils; acrylic, oil, and watercolor paints; pastel. This range of mediums is the perfect way to experiment, build artistic confidence, and define your own unique style. The Art Studio series is designed to give an overview of each art medium to help beginning artists delve into fine art and determine which media they like the best.


My Review:
Art Studio: Faces & Features 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.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.