Product Description

Brimming with practical advice and packed with everything from simple exercises and studies to landscapes, buildings and portraits, this excellent series is ideal for all those wanting to learn how to draw - or for those wanting to improve their skills. Giovanni Civardi discusses composition, perspective, light and shade, detail, texture, building up an image and capturing a likeness, drawing trees, mountains, skies, water and much more. You will find plenty of encouragement and guidance in these enjoyable books, with many helpful tips, a selection of step-by-step demonstrations and a wealth of information. A practical easy-to-follow guide, which shows how to observe and draw portraits of children and adults - and how to capture a likeness. The artist covers all the important techniques including anatomy, proportions of the face, creating realistic features, using tone, formal and informal portraits, and more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #69957 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03
• Original language: Italian
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 64 pages

About the Author
Giovanni Civardi is an Italian artist and teacher who for years has combined studies at the Faculty of Medicine. Milan, with the practice and teaching of sculpture.

Customer Reviews

Best I've found so far
As a newcomer to portrait drawing, I was struggling with the features. I bought several books most of which were mediocre to disappointing. Drawing Portraits by Giovanni Civardi was by far and away the best value for money. I also bought Portraits by Susie Hodge. I enjoyed it but for me, it just doesn't compare to Giovanni Civardi. At the other end of the scale 'How to draw anything' by Mark Linley is excellent value for money at £1.99 - it contains some very useful stuff on features of the face as well as just about anything you might want to draw.

A Great Introduction to Drawing Portraits
Before I bought this book, I was hopeless at drawing portraits. I had been drawing for many years - mainly landscapes and observation drawings - but I had never drawn many portraits and the ones I had done were not that good. However, once I purchased this book, there was a vast improvement.

Giovanni looks at the major features of the face: the eyes, nose, mouth and ears. For each feature, he gives a brief description of the factors to take into account when drawing them, a step-by-step guide to drawing them and several example drawings. After explaining the techniques taken through drawing each feature, Giovanni takes a step-by-step approach to drawing the whole face and follows with several example portraits explaining the distinguishable features of each portrait. The approach goes through the basic steps to drawing the face from drawing a brief outline, identifying the major features and slowly building up the detail.

There are two things that I didn't like about this book, mind you. The first is that Giovanni doesn't explain about drawing the hair. All the example portraits have hair but I find they are drawn in a very simple and somewhat childlike manner. The second problem with this book is that Giovanni only shows you how to draw the features from one perspective. He doesn't explain about different expressions and only explains a bit about viewing the features from different angles.

I have used this book strictly as an introduction to drawing portraits. If you would like a more detailed book, I seriously recommend 'The Artist's Complete Guide to Drawing the Head' by William Maughan.

Overall, this is a good book if you are interested in starting to learn how to draw portraits, however people who already have experience may not find it as useful.

Drawing Portraits: Faces and Figures (Art of Drawing)
Good book for a beginner. I returned it as for me there was nothing new to be learned if you have some art education and experience.