Customer Reviews

Drawing the Human Head

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is excellent! This is first and foremost a book on drawing no fat, face composition "blanks" of human face types. This is the most complete basic face composition book out there. Changing this into a certain person comes later on. If you're looking for a book on how to draw certain people, this is not a book for you. If youre merely looking for in depth info on aging this is not a book for you. If you're merely looking for a book on how to draw faces simple and easy, this is not a book for you. But if you have the desire to know what the form is really like, not just lines, this is the book for you. The illustrations are to be understood, not to be copied. This book is for understanding, not remembering. It's logic, not like a phone number. An instant classic.

For artists who want to get up to speed with drawing heads, Drawing the Human Head will get you creating them in no time.

There are six sections in the book. The first illustrates and describe the basic head structure ' bones, form and proportion ' and the major features on the head. One has to note that Burne Hogarth's drawing for heads are a bit stylised. So they are not 100% realistic in that sense.

Section 2 is probably why you're buying the book for. Here, a simple model is introduced for drawing heads. It is actually the one that's shown on the cover. It helps to locate features on the head in any angle easily, and makes basic construction from memory a breeze.

In section 4, there are drawings of heads from babies to old men, showing the wrinkles and sagging skin. Section 5 talks about head types and presents a gallery of heads highlighting the features of people from different countries. The last section 6 looks at some sculptures and paintings from old masters, interesting but not necessary.

Overall, this is really a speedy guide to learning head drawing. But for truly realistic heads, you have to look elsewhere.

4 out of 5 starts. Recommended for the beginner artists.

(There are more pictures of the book on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)

I absolutely love this book. I learned a lot from it in a short period of time. Most definately I would recomend it to anyone who has an idea about drawing that is interested in drawing portraits.

Burne Hogarth takes you through his technique of measuring human proportions. Beware, at times you will feel less like an artist and more like a mathmatician. Hogarths work is better suited to my sculpture than my drawing as he tends to show all the planes in his work as very defined surfaces. For a beginner trying to draw you can do a lot better.

As another reader said, I'm not particularly fond of Hogarth's style, but this is a useful book (for what it covers). Content is limited in breadth, but goes into good depth on multicultural features and aging. I would have liked to see more examples of females, though, especially aged female faces.

This book does a good job with what it covers. I am no fan of the author's comic book style but the info he gives on proportion and aging were very helpful. He could have done much better with the individual features of the face but this book was a good addition to my library

Although taking a formal course of study in human anatomy will give you greater depth in drawing the human head as far as proportion is concerned, this book does go into more depth than a course would in terms of facial features.

Burne is of the old school in the sense that he probably learned such terms as "dolichocephalic" and "brachiocephalic" in the earlier part of this century, when these labels were commonly applied to ethnic groups. But he ably avoids this obsolete view by demonstrating these head types have examples in a variety of racial and ethnic groups.

This very variety of ethnic facial examples is the greatest strength of the book. I've seen too many comic books try to portray a multi-cultural cast without knowing how!

This book was absolutely horrible. I advise you NOT TO GET THIS BOOK AT ALL COSTS! IT WILL DESTROY YOU IN THE END!