Archive for category Subject: Portraiture
Classic Portrait Painting in Oils || Chris Saper
Posted by henry in Author: Chris Saper, Medium: Oil, Publisher: David & Charles, Publisher: North Light, Subject: Portraiture on January 25, 2012
Although figure painting has been much better served of late, there have historically been few books that look at formal portraiture as opposed to the more popular style of a relaxed likeness. This is perhaps understandable as the classic style is seen as a specialised field requiring particular skills and maybe even equipment.
However, if you want to have a go, this book will help you considerably along the way. The introduction to materials and methods is comprehensive without being overwhelming and includes lighting, positioning the subject within the frame and how to evaluate skin colours. Chris also has useful advice on working from photographs, including what to aim for when you take them. In fact, the book has a neat trick up its sleeve in this respect, as each of the demonstration portraits is done twice, once from life and once from a photograph, and it’s interesting to see how this influences the result.
This is an American book and you should expect American facial types. I don’t mean that it’s outlandish, but there are some quite subtle differences that we don’t see this side of the Atlantic. This shouldn’t put you off, however, as the principles remain the same and, if you’ve followed what Chris is talking about, you’ll be painting your subject, not his.
Draw Portraits || Renate Klein
Posted by henry in Author: Renate Klein, Medium: Drawing, Publisher: Search Press, Subject: Portraiture on December 5, 2011
Books on portraiture aren’t exactly thick on the ground and any new one is always welcome.
Capturing a likeness is one of the most difficult challenges for the artist. Quite apart from the technical matters of getting the image down, the shapes and proportions of the various elements of the body have to be just right, not only individually, but also in combination. Not only does the result have to look like a person, it also has to look like the person it’s meant to be. Everyone’s going to be your critic.
In only 64 pages, all you’re really going to get is an introduction but, as that’s what this book sets out to be, I’d have to say that Renate nails it pretty well perfectly. She’ll tell you enough about anatomy to set you going but not so much that it starts to feel like a medical textbook. She also deals with proportion and with the shapes of eyes, ears, noses and hair. Finally, there are exercises in pencil, charcoal and coloured chalk that illustrated male and female faces as well as babies and children.
There’s a lot here and the book should keep you occupied for a long time and leave you confidently proficient.
Sketching People – faces & figures || Giovanni Civardi
Posted by henry in Author: Giovanni Civardi, Medium: Drawing, Publisher: Search Press, Subject: People, Subject: Portraiture on September 29, 2011
Giovanni Civardi has been something of a fixture in the field of drawing people for some time and his books offer excellent instruction and a wealth of illustration. However, I’ve always felt that there was a certain heaviness to them and that they looked maybe a little dated. And now, suddenly, he seems to have developed a quite delightful lightness of touch and slight loosening that gives his figures life and movement. It’s really quite something of a revelation.
The main body of this relatively short book is taken up with pages of a wide variety of figures: young and old, static and moving, in a variety of costumes and poses. The instruction (though, in truth there are relatively few words) is confined to the introductory sections where Giovanni deals with a few basic drawing principles.
This is a book that’s probably best approached with at least a moderate ability to draw and the ability to interpret without being told what you’re looking at. As long as you have that, there’s a wealth of ideas here and you’ll find that the method of teaching by example works remarkably well.
Realistic Watercolor Portraits || Suzanna Winton
Posted by henry in Author: Suzanna Winton, Medium: Watercolour, Publisher: David & Charles, Publisher: North Light, Subject: Portraiture on March 22, 2011
This is a well thought-out attempt to provide a straightforward guide to painting portraits using examples of representative facial, colour and hair types. Nine step-by-step demonstrations cover most of the combinations you’re likely to find and are of real, rather than imaginary people.
The author makes a good job of her stated intent and the approach is admirably straightforward and easy to follow. I do have a slight issue with her representation of bodies (the faces are fine) as these seem rather bulky and non-articulated. Clothes also look as though they have been carved rather than cut, too. This is perhaps a bit of a quibble as the rest of the book is so admirably handled and I would recommend it for its good points alone, but it’s something to be aware of nonetheless.
How to Paint Living Portraits || Roberta Carter Clark
Posted by henry in Author: Roberta Carter Clark, Medium: Oil, Medium: Watercolour, Publisher: David & Charles, Publisher: North Light, Subject: Portraiture on March 22, 2011
There’s a relatively small, but very steady demand for books on painting portraits and this 1990 guide, reissued in the North Light Classics series, is definitely worth a look.
The first thing to say is that it’s an American publication, so the work included is pretty saccharine and won’t always be to European tastes. Nevertheless, the author is a master of her subject and there’s no arguing with the quality of the results or the depth of the explanations.
The book is well structured and progresses from exercises that work on the proportions of the head to handling the eyes, nose, mouth etc. This is necessarily quite slow work, but fundamental, and the attention to detail here pays dividends later. Further chapters deal with the body, clothing and lighting in a similarly thorough way before we move on to colours and two quite separate sections on working in oil and in watercolour.
This is a book that doesn’t compromise on the quality of its instruction for a more attractive outlook and is all the better for that. If you don’t have access to a real live teacher, this is very much the next best thing.
Vibrant Children’s Portraits || Victoria Lisi
Posted by henry in Author: Victoria Lisi, Medium: Oil, Publisher: North Light, Subject: Children, Subject: Portraiture on February 2, 2010
There’s a slightly saccharine quality to the results produced here, but it’s not something you couldn’t tone down in your own work. Books on portraiture are thin on the ground and on painting children even more so, so this is a particularly welcome gap-filler. There’s a good variety of hair, skin and facial types, as well as sound but simple notes on how to deal with the main facial features and step by step demonstrations that are thorough without being over-worked.
All in all, this is an excellent place to start and would probably also carry some welcome hints for the more practised artist.
Portrait Painting Atelier || Suzanne Brooker
Posted by henry in Author: Suzanne Brooker, Medium: Oil, Publisher: Watson Guptill, Subject: Portraiture on February 1, 2010
Good portrait painting books come along all too infrequently and something which takes the subject seriously and looks at it in such depth as this is to be welcomed. Suzanne Brooker examines every aspect of portrait painting, from style to facial features and expressions to composition and painting methods. There’s a great deal to read here, but there are also plenty of illustrations to leaven and punctuate it so that you’re never left struggling for comprehension. There is a also a generous series of demonstration paintings which are described in some detail. Although, as a result, they have fewer stage illustrations than has perhaps become the norm, they are, I think, more suited to the more technically advanced artist, the sort of person who is likely to be going into portraiture seriously. In any case, the whole book is anything but an introduction for the beginner and will appeal to (and should satisfy) the more demanding reader. It is a large and quite heavy tome that rewards extended study and is admirably comprehensive both in its coverage and its execution of that coverage.
If I have a reservation, it’s perhaps that the style of painting tends rather heavily towards the old-master that’s (admittedly) implied in the subtitle, but it is an American book and American portraiture can be rather like that. I still think you can learn a lot from it, though and I don’t think you’d feel your money was wasted. If that sounds like faint praise, it’s not meant to be.
Face Parts || Simon Jennings
Posted by henry in Author: Simon Jennings, Medium: Drawing, Medium: Oil, Medium: Watercolour, Publisher: Mitchell Beazley, Subject: Faces, Subject: Figure, Subject: Portraiture on November 21, 2008
This is the companion volume to Simon’s very successful Body Parts, which appeared last year, and was planned at the same time. It features the same layout, with a huge variety of photographic images and artistic interpretations in a variety of media. Neither book is a step-by-step how-to of its subject, but rather an in-depth guide to detail work that is absolutely invaluable for any figurative or portrait artist. Using either book it is possible to dispense with a model for most work, allowing much greater freedom in terms of both time taken and variety of interpretation and experimentation.
Simon’s approach in all his books is simply to immerse the reader in visual material to the extent almost of sensory overload so that the subject simply takes over your consciousness. It’s a bold and brave way of working and won’t be for everyone; certainly I wouldn’t recommend this as a book for beginners, who are going to want rather more hand-holding than Simon has to offer. However, for anyone who is reasonably confident with their medium and materials, both books are an invaluable source of reference material as well as guides to methods of working.
Drawing & Painting People: The Essential Guide || ed. Jeffrey Blocksidge and Mary Burzlaff
Posted by henry in Author: Ann Kullberg, Author: Carrie Stuart Parks, Author: Chris Saper, Author: Cindy Agan, Author: Clem Robins, Author: Craig Nelson, Author: Greg Albert, Author: Jeffrey Blocksidge, Author: Mary Burzlaff, Author: Michaelin Otis, Publisher: North Light, Subject: Portraiture on October 16, 2007
Books on portraiture are thin on the ground and any new one is a welcome addition to a select band.
I’m going to start with a couple of reservations. The first is that the style of the finished results is a little stilted and formal and the second is that it’s also perhaps a little sentimentalised. However, this is an American book and that’s how they do things.
I wanted to get that out of the way because if you found this is a shop and flicked through it, you might be put off and start to think , “Ooh, no, that’s not for me” and that would be a pity because the coverage and presentation are some of the best and most comprehensive I’ve seen. The book consists of a series of quite detailed demonstrations, each by a single artist, of specific techniques: skin tones, hair colours, facial types and so on. This allows the reader to concentrate on one thing at a time without having to hunt through the whole book to pick out the specific parts they’re interested in. Although the material has appeared elsewhere, it’s been re-edited to give it a freshness and immediacy that sets this book apart. It’s not, therefore, one you necessarily need to work through from cover to cover, but rather something to use for reference as specific needs arise.
Leaving aside the small initial reservations, the quality of the work and the reproductions, the number of illustrations and the detailed explanations of the progress of each drawing or painting are pretty near perfect. Even if some of the facial types may be less familiar to European eyes and the treatments not quite what we’d expect, anyone following the book should be able to develop the skills to adapt to what they want. Quite simply, if you want to paint or draw portraits, buy this book. It’s excellent value at 192 pages for £14.99 and you’ll get a huge amount out of it.
North Light 2007
£14.99
