The Artist's Complete Guide To Drawing The Head, William L. Maughan - Book Review

I only discovered this book on Amazon a couple of weeks ago and it didn't last on my wishlist for long.  The style of drawing that it describes is similar to that which I've been using for coloured pencils and I thought that this meant it might have lots of tips in it relating to that technique that might be directly applicable to my coloured pencil portraits.  So here goes.

It's a 160-page paperback with nice glossy, shiny pages.  Up to about page 120 it's all about drawing in chiaroscuro style.  That's in monochrome with a small number of distinct values, often just two but, in this book, it's four values.  These 120 pages make up five of the seven chapters in the book.  They're followed by a ten page chapter on drawing from multiple sources and a thirty page chapter on colour.

Those first five chapters are:

- an introduction, including materials

- the principles of chiaroscuro, including the two different types of shadow and the whole philosophy of drawing shapes rather than edges: contour drawing is out of the window

- some general points drawing the head, applying the chiaroscuro rules in the previous chapter but also discussing perspective, viewing angle and lighting

- more specific points on drawing the head, starting with the gesture drawing and the usual proportion rules for where to place features on the face but then going into lots of specific advice about drawing eyes, ears, mouth nose and hair in this chiaroscuro style

- a five step drawing process, along with four demonstrations

Let's talk about those first five chapters before going any further because they all hang together and the final two chapters feel like addons.  Those five chapters are off the charts.  The chiaroscuro method sounds so simple to use and obviously effective that I'm amazed this is the first time I've seen it covered in this sort of depth.  And it all hangs together so well.  In that second chapter, the author talks about the two types of shadow, form shadow and cast shadow, and gives some simple rules for how each type should be drawn differently.  It includes discussion of reflected light within shadows, something that was also covered in the James Gurney book.  And there's a big emphasis on marking in shapes as shapes and resisting the temptation to draw their outlines and colour them in.  But then these rules get referred back to time and time again in the rest of the book until they feel like second nature.  Oh, and everything here is illustrated with well labelled diagrams.

Then there's the chapter on specifics.  Eyes, ears, nose, mouth and hair.  It would be easy to repeat everything I've seen in other books about what shapes there are in these features.  You know, how the iris of the eye is elliptical rather than circular when not viewed straight on, that sort of thing.  But, no, here we're talking about drawing these features in chiaroscuro.  There's lots of specific advice that I've not seen before on exactly where the shadows and highlights are on those features.  See, we don't care about where the edges of of the features are, only where the edges of the shadows are, not that we'd ever draw the edges themselves.

Everything is just hanging together beautifully.  Even when we get to the demonstrations, I don't learn much but I do have all that earlier learning reinforced.  The demos are each four or five steps long and are worded as demonstrations and not as instructions, which suits me.

If we just stopped at this point, I'd be happy.  Anything else that was useful in the rest of the book would just be a bonus.  And, for me, there were no bonuses in the next ten pages.  They're about drawing from multiple sources, so we see things like portraits of women where the noses have been replaced by pig snouts and the ears by elephant ears.  This chapter just didn’t rock my boat.  As well as being of little interest to me and feeling a bit out of place compared to the rest of the book, I found it to be a bit light on content: if I wanted to do drawings like this, I'd be looking for another book to get some deeper advice.

And finally there are the last 30 pages on colour.  It took an experienced eye to be able to extract value from this chapter.  There was a lot of introductory medium-specific advice on using charcoal and dry pastels that was of little interest to me but that I can’t deny belongs in there.  There was some general colour theory stuff in there.  I found it interesting how split primary palettes (a warm and cool version of each of red, blue and yellow) were described as a set of six tertiary colours, something that has never crossed my mind before.  I found it weird how red was described as neither warm nor cool.  I took this with a pinch of salt, although it's something I'll think about while drawing portraits.  And then there was some more directly applicable stuff on where to vary colour temperatures in a painting, how to use analogous colour schemes (with and without complements) and choice of background colours.  There were definitely some bonus tips in this chapter.  After reading those last two chapters, it feels like the author has a couple more books in him on cut 'n' shuts and on painting with soft pastels, although neither of them would interest me at this point of my artistic career.

So it's time for the final assessment and here it is.  This book is a game changer.  It's well written, all based around simple principles, so accessible, but also full of useful advice that I don’t see in other places.  And everything is all viewed through a chiaroscuro lens.  It all sounds so easy and I can't wait to put it all into practice.  This one gets an easy five palettes.

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