This is a post for all portrait artists and those who aspire to become one.
The idea is to crowdsource a perspective on which are the best art instruction books which cover portraiture:
- drawing and/or painting portraits
- and/or portrait artists
- and/or portraiture in general
In recent years round about this time I ask you about your views on your best art books
I decided the next crowd sourcing enquiry one should be about drawing and painting people - and portraiture. However ran into one or two problems.....
I personally arrived at portraiture via drawing people with no clothes on! I got back into art via a life class at Central St. Martins School of Art. A lot of the first art books I bought were about drawing people - here's part of my portraiture (art instruction) shelf - except I look at it and can spot the ones which are missing!
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| Some of my books about drawing and painting figures and portraits |
From there I then later did a class about Drawing the Head at the Princes Drawing School - and you can see my efforts on my website -
Drawing A Head and Drawing Artists
The thing is when I first came to tackle the topic of portraiture for this Enquiry I got well and truly entangled.
There are just so many sub-topics and so many books! So I started trying to sort them out and ended up creating two websites (which I've almost finished)
The first one I decided should be about
art instruction relating to:
- drawing the figure / anatomy for artists
- drawing key features - the head, face and hands
- painting portraits (in different media)
My second website is about the
history of portraiture and individual portrait artists. It focuses more on books which show you the artwork produced by individual portrait artists and those who liked drawing figures.
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| This is my Lucian Freud stash! |
Which books about portraiture do you recommend?