Drawing the Human Head

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.

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.

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.

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!