Portrait Drawing for Kids by Angela Rizza

Portrait Drawing for Kids: A Step-by-Step Guide to Drawing Faces by Angela Rizza ISBN-13: 978-1641527255 Paperback: 304 pages Publisher: Rockridge Press Released: May 19th 2020

Source: review copy from the publisher.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
Anyone can take a picture―but drawing a person with recognizable likeness takes practice. Portrait drawing offers a completely unique interpretation of your subject, and Portrait Drawing for Kids gives budding artists the skill set they need to draw pictures of themselves, their family, and friends. Broken down into simple, step-by-step instructions, this book will teach you every aspect of portraiture, from features of the face, to capturing emotions, to techniques like shading and highlighting. This drawing for kids book will help you take your artistic talents to the next level―beginning with a sharpened pencil.


My Review:
Portrait Drawing for Kids is an art instruction book for beginners at drawing human faces with graphite pencil. The targeted age range is 9 to 12 years old, but I think it would be most useful for teenagers and adults since it assumes a certain level of focus and observational skills. In each chapter, she taught a new concept and then demonstrated how to draw it using six illustrated steps with brief text instructions for each step. She then provided three practice pages which simply showed the six steps with no new instructions. These practice faces would be at different angles and be both male and female and different ethnicities.

The author started by looking at the basic facial shape and how the face changes when you view it from the front, side, three quarters view, etc. Then she covered eyes and eyebrows, nose and mouth, different expressions, shading and how it changes based on the direction of the light source, adding ears, necks, hair, beards, and glasses. She then had you practice by doing different activities (with explanations on how to pose or otherwise do these activities), like drawing yourself, your friends, profiles, and group portraits. She also had you look at different portrait styles throughout history and try some of those styles. Overall, I would recommend this book to beginners at drawing faces, but I was confused by why she didn't better explain how to get an individuals facial portions correct.


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.