Product Description

All artists are tired of persuading their nearest and dearest to look sad...look glad...look mad...madder...no, even madder...okay, hold it. For those artists (and their long-suffering friends), here is the best book ever. FACIAL EXPRESSIONS includes more than 3,500 photographs of fifty faces, men and women of a variety of ages, shapes, sizes, and ethnicities, each demonstrating a wide range of emotions and shown from multiple angles. Who can use this book? Oh, only every artist on the planet, including art students, illustrators, fine artists, animators, story boarders, and comic-book artists. But wait, there's more! Additional photos focus on people wearing hats and couples kissing. while illustrations show skull anatomy and facial musculature. Still not enough? How about a one-of-a-kind series of photos of lips pronouncing the phonemes used in human speech? Animators will swoon--and artists will show a range of facial expressions from happy to happiest to ecstatic.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8353 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Mark Simon founded and owns Orlando, Florida-based A&S Animation, Inc., a cel-animation house, and Animatics & Storyboards, Inc., one of the largest storyboard houses in the United States. He has designed sets and special effects on live-action feature films as well as produced award-winning shorts, commercials, and shows for Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. The author of two previous books on animation.

Customer Reviews

Useful rather than essential
This is a useful but not essential reference book for the artist. There is a comprehensive range of models of various ages depicting an array of expressions though it is at times difficult to know which ones they're supposed to be! It would have been helpful if the author had listed the expression under each photo instead of having to cross reference a list at the front of the book. I think it's unfair, as a previous reviewer wrote, to label all the people as 'ugly'. They are, by and large, ordinary looking people you'd probably see in the street and many have faces full of character. Who would want to buy a book full of unnaturally beautiful or bland faces to work from? I checked out the Fairburn system too; it's out of print and if you do find a set of books it's very expensive (over £100). This is an inexpensive alternative - cheap and cheerful - but I can't help think that you'd be better of with a handily placed mirror to work from or, better still, a digital camera to take pictures of yourself for reference.

A fun and useful tool
As a budding comic book artist, I found this book very useful. The facial expressions are well photographed and the models (both attractive and not so much) have some great and unusual expressions which are definately useful. Also though, the hairstyles, weight and age of the models is agreat help. Most reference books use people ages only 20-30, but this book covers ages 20 to 83.

Also at the end of the book, there is a gallery of sequential expressions, kissing, hats & headgear and phonemes (for those not in the know, these are the shape your mouth makes when you say certain letters. Dead useful for animation).

Definately great reference for any artist, but it would have been better in colour, hence the 4 star rating.

so so
This book is certainly useful, however I imagine there to be several better books available. The trouble I found with this was, although there are several differing shots for emotions etc, the actual photography can be pretty bad. For example, the shots are sometimes out of focus, too small and the contrast on the images is not high enough to enable you to see clearly the detail. It would have worked better using less images and making them larger. Not that it matters too much but the illustrations are hideous! Used for general face shape in many positions/emotions, this is a half decent book and the phonemes at the back are very useful.