Beginner’s Guide to Drawing Portraits

Carole Massey was born in Hertfordshire and studied at St. Albans School of Art and Leicester School of Art & Design. After a career in advertising and graphic design, Carole returned to her first love, painting, full-time. She now teaches and runs weekend workshops, as well as organising painting holidays. Carole's work is exhibited widely, and she is particularly known for her celebrity portraits, mostly inspired by photographs. She uses a wide variety of media including acrylic, watercolour, pastel, pencil and monochrome.Visit her website www.carolemassey.com

• Introduction 6Materials 8Your first portrait 26Self portrait 28Shape and structure 32Features 38Proportions 46Capturing a likeness 68Dimithra 72Shading, tone and form 76Character and expression 90Moving on 96Rosie 102Drawing from life 106Composition 114Story 124Maasai Warrior 132Cora 136Experimenting 140Index 144

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.