Drawing The Head & Figure, Jack Hamm – Book Review

And now for something completely different.  A book that can’t be read.  This isn’t a book that you can sit down and read cover to cover because it’s not a book.  It’s a manual.  I’ve had a damn good go but reading this is like reading a car manual.  It’s not just that the book is dense with tips and information (which it is).  There are dense books that you can read cover to cover (like Making Colour Sing, which I want to read a second time before I review it) and end up wishing you’d taken notes on, but this isn’t one of them.  Nobody reads a car manual and ends up wishing they’d made notes.

Is it any good though?  Well, there’s so much information there that some of it has to be useful.  It’s just that it’s not a book to put to one side having learned something from it.  It’s a book to dig out for help with particular things when you need it.  When I want to paint knees, I’ll go straight to the bit in this book on knees, find what I need, then set off.  It means I don’t get know which bits of this book will be the most useful, although I suspect it will be the bits on the face (there’s some great stuff on drawing eyes).

But what if I wanted to paint a full body portrait?  Would this book help?  This is where I think it falls short.  The information throughout the book is so specific that I suspect my resulting painting would be an ugly amalgamation of beautiful hands, eyes, ears, etc that didn’t all fit together.

I also have the Jack Hamm book on painting animals waiting to be reviewed.  I suspect I’ll like that book more because when I want to draw elephants I’ll look up the bit on elephants.  Unless I want to paint a whole zoo I won’t have the problems that I can envisage painting a whole human body using this book.  It’s also possible that, once I’ve read Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, I’ll feel more confident at the macro level and that this book really helps at the micro level, but we’ll see.

Time to sum my thoughts on what I forgot to mention earlier is a 120 page paperback.  I don’t regret adding this book to my wishlist and I’m glad to have it as a reference.  But it’s very much a manual with lots of advice on specifics and, having read it, I’m not yet feeling confident that I’m ready to paint or draw a full figure portrait.  It gets three palettes.