Draw People Every Day, Kagan McLeod – Book Review

Time for another book review.  Today it’s Draw People Every Day by Kagan McLeod.  It’s a hefty feeling 196-page paperback.

It’s a strange book that I find quite jarring.  It claims to be made up of short lessons when, in reality there are three huge chapters in there on line, tone and colour,  Those chapters are divided up a bit into things like figure drawing, figure drawing from reference, portrait drawing, portrait drawing from reference but there’s no feeling I get at any point that the book is anything other than one single 196-page long chapter.  There’s lots of repetition in there and lots of tips that would be better off appearing in other places in the book.  There are all these great example drawings in the book with a bit of text next to them but it wasn’t clear where the text bits fit into the overall narrative.  In other books, you can read what’s on the page, then what’s under the drawings but in this book, you can’t do that as the text on the page often continues into the next page and who wants to stop in the middle of a sentence to look at the pictures?  Even the introduction, which I was expecting to be all about equipment, started getting into stuff that belonged in other places.  And sometimes the tips next to the pictures related to stuff the author talks about in other places in the book: there wasn’t always a great matchup between the pictures and the text.

So it was all a bit of a badly written mess really.  If you ever sit down to take notes on this book you’ll understand.

The best idea I got from the book is of starting a people painting with some loose gestural colour strokes then, only after this, to start adding some lines, some detail and some darker tones.  He must describe something like this four or five times if I count the explanations under the pictures as well as the descriptions in the text.  This technique is also covered by Bill Buchman in his book though, and Bill has lots of other useful ideas.

I’m just feeling so tired after making notes on this book that I need to stop here before I start rambling like Kagan.  I’m downgrading this book to one palette after reading three figure drawing books in August 2020.  This one doesn’t come close to the same heights as Legaspi, Huston or its closest cousin Buchman.