As someone who is wanting to learn how to draw, this book is a great resource to learn those skills. Great book and helpful tool.

Pocket Art: Portrait Drawing is a nice book to reference when working on Faces. I also found that this was quick moving and the change from one to the next was VERY quick and not all that basic. So it depends on your talent and where you are in your drawing skills as to if this will be a good fit for you. I know for me, if I’m working on a certain part, say an ear, then this resource can be helpful for me to look at.
I received a digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This book was an excellent drawing book specifically for those concentrating on drawing portraits. There are a lot of drawing exercises focusing on the details of portraits. The section on how to draw hair was very helpful. This book covers all the important portrait drawing topics, hair type, expressions, skin tone, placement of features and more.

I received this galley from NetGalley.

One of those times where I feel like I've bitten more than I could chew. My biggest frustrations with my art is learning how to draw people and create portraits. The best I can do at the moment are manga drawings but I thought to check this book out to see what if I can learn something. This book, while very informative, was not as friendly for newbies as I hoped. Maybe if you've already had a bit of experience doing portraits, the artist's tips may be more helpful to you than it is to someone like me who has barely started exploring the craft.

#NetGalley

Miss Led teach from scratch how to produce portraits. The techniques are easy to follow. The book covers everything: from head to shoulders. Excellent book!

I've always struggled in sketching portraits so I thought I'd give this book a try. I'm pleased to say that after studying some of the step by step instructions and training myself how to really see shapes in the subject, I'm much less terrible and even improving. Great resource for basic anatomy also.

The title of "quick guide" really does justice to this book - it is a really quick and short guide to how to draw some portraits.

While the tips presented and the illustrations were great (some illustrations were gorgeous), in the end I felt like this book was a little bit too simple and too short. You could gather all the info presented in it and quickly share it in an article in a magazine. It's not something that necessarily needs to be a book.

But, hey, it is useful too - I am sure the simplicity of it will attract more people to trying their chance at portraits and to learn to observe people more. But after they master these techniques they will need another book to fully create a more complex portrait.

Informative easy to follow instruction on drawing faces. I learned a lot about drawing faces in many different angles. I also learned the proper proportions for faces which took my drawing from a rather whimsical style to actually producing portraits which are much more realistic and appealing. A wonderful tool to help improve your drawing skills:

An excellent guide for portrait beginners - or people like myself who used to draw but can no longer hold a pencil properly - with wonderful illustrations, techniques, and colours!

This is a great book if you like learning by mostly illustrations. It gave a clear, concise drawings with tips mixed in. Good for beginners.

An invaluable resource for artists who want to include portraits in their skill set. Easy-to-follow, step-by-step examples show the basics of form, proportion, alignment of the face, before moving on to specifics about each detail of the face (eyes, ears, nose, etc.) and how to capture emotions.

I would definitely want this handy reference in my library. Very well done!!

Many thanks to NetGalley and Rockport Publishing for allowing me to read the book in exchange for an unbiased review.

This book is exactly what it sets out to be, a pocket book on portrait drawing. Following the introduction it is divided into four main sections: Your setup; Understanding the face; Features, and Skin Tones and Hair. It explains what you need to prepare to draw and plenty of examples of how to draw a portrait and the different facial features within it. As a guide for a beginner I found this very helpful.

If I were an already advanced artist seeking a refresher on composing faces, I would absolutely adore this pocket book. On roughly 150 pages, the artist takes you through the defining elements of the human face: facial angles, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and the light refraction on eyebrows and hair. The book reads like a handy guide to a professional art student.

As a complete novice myself, it’s a little more difficult to take the quick tips and make them work as well as they do in this pocket guide. The artist makes some ovals, darkens some lines, and then the next page there’s a fully fleshed, gorgeous depiction of a woman’s upturned face. Definitely not for novices.

However, I dis learn a few things that will serve me well in art to come. The author recommends that you focus on all the facial features at once, instead of focusing on one point in the face. I would always spend an hour trying to make the perfect nose until I realized it was completely out of proportion with the rest of the face.

To be honest this book wasn't particularly useful or original. It gave basic instructions about the anaotmy of a face and showed different angles and ways to draw eyes, noses, ears etc. and that was all. Good for beginners or if you want to do realistic portraits from different angles, nothing else

I've enjoyed this modern look at perspective and personality in portrait drawing. If you've ever wanted to make faces come alive, you'll find a lot of ideas here.

There are great illustrations, how-tos, and tips that will boost your work and help you appreciate existing portraits. The movement, style, and fresh look at drawing faces will make you smile - and grab your sketching tools.

Recommended.

This is a really handy little book and ideal for beginners and experienced artists alike. There are loads of exercises and examples in the book but very little writing. At first I thought that the lack of writing would be a hindrance but the sketches actually talk for themselves. Very clever.

It is not a straight beginner book, more of a beginner to an intermediate artist. There is somehow to but looks like you have to have read and practice from other books.

Many thanks for this advanced copy. It inspired me to get out my pencils and have a go. I was amazed at how good my attempt was. This book gives clear and simple examples of how to construct facial features. I’ve never before been able to draw and eye so realistic I thought it was going to wink at me! I have always struggled with noses but now I understand how to get the right positioning and shape. I felt confident enough to attempt a self portrait and i’m really pleased with the result. Hands next please?

This is a super handy quick guide to simple ways to draw portrait's.



With shaping tips for the face and features with plenty of visual guide and minimal wording, we are shown all aspects of facial features we could need help with. The use of shading is huge as a tip for adding depth and more life to a portrait.



With simple pencil drawn guides before and after stages as well as full blown colour face pictures, we can see how the images produced have progressed like ours should do too.



Very useful if you're unsure where to start of want to progress and improve your work.



Many thanks to the publishers for allowing me to review this book for them!

"Portrait Drawing" provides tips on how to draw simple portraits of people using pencils. The author briefly described the basics of using a pencil to draw (like how to hold the pencil and the types of marks you can make). Then she showed how to draw a general face/head oval and place guidelines on it to help put the facial features in the correct spots. She then focused on drawing each facial feature at various angles and included male/female and age differences. She also provided sketches and some tips for creating expressions, skin tones, and different types of hair.

The book was mainly illustrations showing how to block in the face and features from various viewing angles plus a number of the author's finished portraits. Overall, I'd recommend this book to artists who like examples and tips on creating portraits at unusual angles, as that seemed to be the strong point of this book.