Drawing and Painting Expressive Little Faces by Amarilys Henderson

Drawing and Painting Expressive Little Faces

by Amarilys Henderson

In Drawing and Painting Expressive Little Faces, artist and popular Skillshare instructor Amarilys Henderson shares her practical and creative techniques for drawing and painting faces with style and personality.
  • Gathering supplies. Consider the creative possibilities of watercolor, ink, and markers, and create a mobile sketch pack so you can capture faces and expressions on the go.
  • Simplifying the face and identifying proportions. Use photos to simplify the face’s key elements, learn about facial proportions and factors and variables for placing facial features, and apply these concepts through a simple warm up using a single color to paint a face in multiple values.
  • Facial shapes and features. Learn about the five basic facial shapes and how to modify the chin line, ears, and hairline, and how to draw and paint mouths, eyes, and noses and make alterations to show pose and personality. 
  • Mixing color. The pigments and brushes you’ll need to achieve a wide range of realistic skin tones, shadows, and expressions.
  • Bringing faces to life. Navigate the process from start to finish, learn to adjust line quality to suggest different genders and ethnicities, and change up artistic styling to put a unique spin on your creations. 
  • Project ideas. Get inspired by some cool ways to apply your new skills: party invitations, repeat patterns, comic books, and more!
Don’t be intimidated by the challenge of drawing and painting faces. Improve your face game with Drawing and Painting Expressive Little Faces!

Reviewed by annieb123 on

5 of 5 stars

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Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Drawing and Painting Expressive Little Faces is a step by step tutorial book by Amarilys Henderson. Released 18th Feb 2020 by Quarto on their Quarry imprint, it's 144 pages and will be available in hardcover and ebook formats.

This is a well presented and colorful tutorial guide for rendering faces in several media: watercolors, liquid pigment, paint paper pigments, and inks & markers. The tutorials are very well illustrated and include step by step process illustrations.

The tools and materials are universal and will already be owned by most artists. For readers starting from scratch, the basics are easily accessible and inexpensive. The introduction includes a good discussion of tools and materials and cover both practical (what paper to choose) to encouraging general advice (getting over the intimidation of starting and gaining confidence).

The instructional chapters break down the face into features, showing proportions and individual eyes, noses, hair, etc and then show the student how to build the parts into a cohesive and pleasing whole. The whole book is quite versatile, but I think the art is especially suited to (and I will use it for) enhancing bullet journals. I had been looking for a specific tutorial guide for bu-jo sketching and this is a nice one.

This would make a superlative selection for a makers group/studio or for the home library. The numerous well illustrated included tutorials are simple but really appealing.

Five stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 17 May, 2020: Finished reading
  • 17 May, 2020: Reviewed