Draw Faces In 15 Minutes: Jake Spicer – Book Review

I had a slightly bad feeling when buying this one that it might be a bit lightweight, like the urban sketching handbook series.  Thin on pages and thin on ideas, doing little more than regurgitating all the tips that all similar books have in common and having nothing extra to add on top of that.  I was wrong.

After giving us all the usual stuff about materials and how to draw, the book starts getting interesting.  Jake’s has a numbered step approach to portraiture that starts off quite blurry before adding detail and them more detail on top of that.  I liked how some of the steps in the process were about rubbing out most of what was already down on the paper, leaving faint lines as indications of where to go over in more detail.  That struck a chord with me.  I’ve not seen other authors talking about rubbing out and adding improvements.

Another thing I liked was the structuring of the book.  Rather than just go through portraiture in one big long chapter, Jake gave us a chapter on how to do a basic portrait.  Then another chapter on improvements that could be made to this process.  Then another chapter on extra things like getting a likeness and on how age and gender make faces different.  This is the best way to learn.  You need to walk around the mountain before you climb it.

The book’s aimed at people using graphite pencils or maybe charcoal but, because there wasn’t much in there about graduated shading, pretty well everything also applied to markers and inktense pencils, which suits me.

The book feels like it fills a hole.  Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain and Keys To Drawing are a great introduction to drawing and The Big Book Of Realistic Drawing Secrets went into lots of detail on realism but there’s room for something in between.  That’s the hole that Jake has filled.  Two other areas I look out for in books are whether the art within them is an inspiration and how easy they are to read.  The artwork in this one isn’t what I’d call inspirational – it’s there to instruct rather than to amaze, which still makes it worthwhile.  And for ease of reading, yeah, Jake easily clears the bar on that one.

Overall, I was expecting to give this one no more than three palettes.  After all, it’s small and thin with silly handwriting and a cartoony face on the cover.  It doesn’t look like a serious art book.  Just something that somebody threw together for a laugh.  But it’s not.  There are plenty of ideas in there, often giving concrete examples of things you could spot if you just sat and observed.  And from what I’ve seen, it does fill a hole in the library of art instruction books.  Let’s go for four palettes.

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