Portraits Books

Facial Expressions: A Visual Reference for Artists

Mark Simon

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 45 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Not good for serious sculptors 1 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I purchased this book to use as a reference for sculpting faces on dolls. The book shows different angles of the expressions and that was what I needed. Unfortunately what I did not need was an entire book filled with goofy expressions that you'd never even see on a human face!! There was no romantic expressions or serene, contented, laughing mildly at something mildly funny expressions. Just over the top, completely over exaggerated mutated faces! If you need some serious or normal faces, Don't buy this book.

Editorial Review:

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 2,500 photographs of 50 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, storyboarders, 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.

Color Mixing Recipes for Portraits: More than 500 Color Combinations for skin, eyes, lips & hair (Color Mixing Recipes)

William F. Powell

Amazon Price: $9.95 List Price: $9.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Walter Foster Amazon Marketplace: 36 new & used starting at $5.52

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

great technical advice 5 out of 5 stars.
23 of 23 people found this review helpful.

If you are looking for a technical guide on how to mix skin colours for all the different races of people (well most anyway) then this is the book for you. It gives you all the information you need (which paint and how much)to mix just about every shade of flesh, covering both cool and warm versions, it covers the full tonal range for each mix and shadow effects. In summery it is the most comprehensive flesh colour mixing book I have come across yet and I have got most of the more popular books on this subject. At this price it is a bargin

Mixing Colour 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

This is great value for a novice that needs help to mix skin colours. The text is kept to a minimum and the charts clear to understand.

Editorial Review:

From Caucasian to Latino and East Indian hues, this convenient book features master mixes for an arry of skin colors, plus recipes for hair, eye, and lip colors. The concealed wire-o bound book also includes a plastic color-mixing grid for measuring out paints, as well as a handy conversion chart for finding acrylic equivalents of oil paints and vice versa.

Sargent Portrait Drawings: 42 Works by John Singer Sargent (Dover Art Library)

John Singer Sargent

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Sargent Portrait Drawings 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The book is great. The ones who sent it didn't package it well. It is a paperback book and it came all bent up.

What would you expect from the master ? 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

A good book full of great drawings by one of the best artist I have ever studied. The price is right and you should not waist one more minute before you order it.
I always like to see how the great artist draw, since drawing is the back bone to good painting in my mind.
I really get a kick out of artist who say they can't draw and can only paint, sure.. Thats like saying you never learned to walk and that you can only run.
Sargent used to say you should draw every day and I think he was right.

Editorial Review:

Collection of portraits, selected from public and private holdings by art historian Trevor J. Fairbrother, reveal the technical skill and intuitive eye for which American portrait painter John Singer Sargent is renowned. Drawings in pencil, pastels and charcoal—a lesser-known aspect of Sargent’s oeuvre—are shown. List of Plates. Introduction. Captions.

Bouguereau

Fronia E. Wissman, Adolphe-William Bouguereau

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

In a World of his Own 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 10 people found this review helpful.

Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825-1905) is in many ways the French equivalent of the British Victorian class of figurative painters - Lawrence Alma Tadema, Lord Leighton, JW Waterhouse - and had he lived in England rather than in the Impressionist laden France, he would be much better known today. Not that Bouguereau is unfamiliar to collectors and museums: in his time his portraits and luxurious paintings of shepherdesses and mythological creatures in a world of eternal beauty were popular and were added to important collections. It is only now with the new respect for the figure in painting that his name is becoming more recognizable.

Fronia E. Wissman has written a concise and illuminating text for this monograph and her style of exposition matches her subject. The book is filled with magnificent illustrations of Bouguereau's paintings with details and full-scale works allowed the prestige of excellent color reproductions. This is a fine monograph and one that belongs in the libraries of collectors and art historians who remain fascinated with the fin de siècle schools of painting. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, September 05

John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes, 1874-1882; Complete Paintings: Volume IV (John Singer Sargent)

Richard Ormond, Elaine Kilmurray, Warren Adelson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

From 1874 to 1882, John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) produced more than 200 paintings and water-colors aside from portraiture, including figures in landscape settings, architectural studies, seascapes, subject paintings, and studies after old masters. From powerful studies of models in Paris in the mid-1870s to compelling paintings set in Venice in the early 1880s, the works published in this volume of the catalogue raisonné show the variety of his aesthetic responses. He worked in the studio and en plein air, travelling widely during the eight years covered in this volume and painting in Paris, Brittany, Capri, Spain, North Africa, and Venice.
This is the first time that Sargent’s early work has been mapped so comprehensively. With very few exceptions, this beautifully produced book illustrates all the pictures under discussion in color. Each painting, including several which have never been published before, is documented in depth with full provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography, and in many cases new information is provided. The volume also reproduces a wealth of Sargent’s preliminary and related drawings and of comparative works by other artists.

The Art of Portrait Drawing: Learn the Essential Techniques of the Masters

Joy Thomas

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Learn how to turn what you see into masterful, expressive art. With the practical instruction and advice in these pages, you can develop the skills necessary to draw fine portraits in the realist tradition.

In The Art of Portrait Drawing, skilled artist Joy Thomas passes on to you the lessons she has gathered from generations of the world’s greatest artists. Learn about the golden mean, the traditional three-color portrait, the secrets of proportion and more methods used by the Old Masters and today’s best artists alike!

Inside you’ll find: · An introduction to every commonly used drawing medium, including charcoal, Conté and graphite · An illustrated overview of the history of portrait drawing · Time-honored methods for drawing accurately · Insights on how to capture not only the likeness, but also the mood and essence of your subject · Advice on posing a subject, setting up lighting, choosing the right tools and composing effectively · 9 in-depth, step-by-step drawing demonstrations to develop your skills and your confidence Portraying the human face is the ultimate expression of art. Use The Art of Portrait Drawing as the road map for your artistic quest.

Expressive Portraits: Creative Methods for Painting People

Jean Pederson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Fantastic! But had hoped the mediums were different... 4 out of 5 stars.
8 of 9 people found this review helpful.

What an amazing artist. I love her contemporary take on portraiture. I'm hoping to adapt her techniques to acrylics or oils on board and/or canvas, rather than watercolor and gouache on paper. She does use some acrylics however, and overall I give this a thumbs-up. Very inspiring!

Editorial Review:

Paint beautiful and expressive portraits by combining watercolor with other mediums!

What makes an eye-popping, eye-stopping portrait? It's all about contrast and the play of opposites, round shape against square, light against dark, transparent with opaque. Combining mediums allows you to push the inherent properties of each for a lively play of opposites. You'll be able to paint glorious lights, richer darks, intriguing texture and mysterious passages that create mood and a strong sense of place, space and character. Jean Pederson gives you all the advice and instruction you need to paint beautiful, expressive portraits filled with life and spirit. Let your portraits speak to the world!

The Mural at the Waverly Inn: A Portrait of Greenwich Village Bohemians

Edward Sorel

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Editorial Review:

The Waverly Inn has been a landmark in New York’s Greenwich Village since the 1920’s. But since 2006, when Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter bought and refurbished the restaurant, it has also been one of the most sought after destinations in the city. And while we can’t guarantee you a reservation there, we can bring you the wonderful, witty mural by Edward Sorel that graces its walls.
Sorel--whose caricatures and drawings regularly appear in The New Yorker and on its cover--chose forty Greenwich Village greats from the past 150 years to cavort in bacchanalian splendor. Each of the 40 makes a solo appearance in these pages alongside a charming, telling vignette of his or her life by Dorothy Gallagher, then appears in a foldout of the entire mural at the back of the book.
Here you will find Walt Whitman being attacked by a ferocious Truman Capote butterfly; Jane Jacobs, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Willa Cather playing ring-around the rosy; those famous denizens of the White Horse Tavern, Dylan Thomas--who breakfasted on beer and lunched on brandy--and Jack Kerouac, typing his long roll of a novel. Anais Nin appears nude, which, Gallagher points out, was her usual state. Norman Mailer admires himself in a reflecting pond. Here, too, are Djuna Barnes and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jackson Pollack and James Baldwin, Thelonius Monk, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, Andy Warhol and Fran Lebowitz, Margaret Sanger, Marlon Brando, and many others.
The Mural at the Waverly Inn is an enduring delight to treasure and to give.

The Nude Female Figure: A Visual Reference for the Artist

Mark E. Smith

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Great study material 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

The pictures are well taken and very usefull for art study, to use as models for paintings and other art.

Perfect Referene 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I had a need for a reference of body structure. The book I selected was exactly what I needed. I will keep this book forever and will be able to use it many times. I was very satisfied with this book.

Editorial Review:

Standing. Seated. Reclining. Kneeling. Bending. Crouching. Running. World-renowned photographer Mark Edward Smith has captured women of every age and form in every type of movement, then gathered his striking, unusual images into The Nude Female Figure. An indispensable reference for artists who have limited access to live figure models, this remarkable book features striking images of shapely young women as well as elegiac photos of more mature women. The models in these full-color pictures include women of every type--slender women, not-so-slender women, pregnant women, and women of color. A special section shows close-ups of the hands and feet. Each pose is beautiful, and the unparalleled attention to composition, lighting, and reproduction make it easy for artists to see the relationships between the parts of the body and to study the classic female figure.

Painting People: Figure Painting Today

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