Drawing For The Absolute Beginner Carole Massey

The Beginner's Guide to Drawing Portraits || Carole Massey

If publishers ask (and they do periodically), my advice with older books is to leave them as they were. The idea of re-editing something into a new product never really works. It's a bit like trying to turn a shirt into a pair of trousers. Even if you have enough material, the pieces will never be quite the right shape and the old seams will never lie quite flat. There'll be compromises, gaps and false joins that'll always be unsatisfactory. That applies to the trousers as well.

This started life in the Drawing Masterclass series, but has been completely restructured and what you now have is effectively a new book. The last time Search Press did this, I raised a quizzical eyebrow because all they'd really done was change the title. This is a complete re-working and a great deal of credit must go to Carole Massey who has done the heavy lifting here. She has not only added new material, but re-written and simplified to an amazing extent. Concentrating on the head and shoulders simplifies things immeasurably – you can forget about hands, feet, clothes and posture, for instance. It also allows her to concentrate on the form, features and expressions of the face, which is mainly what the book is about.

This is not so much a course as an examination of the way portraits are built up. Although the way through it is progressive – you're always building on and reinforcing what you learnt before, there aren't the same number of examples, exercises and demonstrations. They're there, and you'll find them, but in a less structured way. It's very subtle how the material you need is to hand just when you want it, rather than when you've come to expect it.

There's an excellent variety of gender, ethnicity, shape, form and age here. Carole is particularly good with babies and children and you could justify the relatively modest cover price for that alone.

This is probably one of the best introductions to portrait drawing around and the fact that it uses recycled material is probably only of interest to reviewers like me. You won't see the joins.

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This entry was posted on February 2, 2021, 12:22 pm and is filed under Author: Carole Massey, Medium: Drawing, Publisher: Search Press, Subject: Children, Subject: Portraiture. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.