Facial Expressions For Artists, Oliver Sin – Book Review

While this bathroom’s being fitted, I’m not just painting portraits with the markers: I thought I’d also get some CPD in, so I’ve been reading this book. It’s about taking my portrait work to another level. All my portraits are currently posterised, with a big emphasis on values, because this is how I plan on working if I make it on to PAOTY. But once my PAOTY chances are over, I need to start challenging myself to adopt new techniques and to get better. I thought this book might be a first step to help me do that.

It’s a 160 page paperback. Nice shiny pages and I get a reassuring feeling of quality when I pick it up. Just flicking through, there’s a higher but not excessive pictures to words ratio than in most books. The pictures are all in black and white, examples of Oliver’s work in graphite and charcoal. The cover of the book suggests that it’s all about facial expressions but it’s more about facial anatomy, with emotion and expressions being just part of the story.

Looking at the contents, we have:

• about 25 pages on the bones and muscles in the head
• about 25 pages on the anatomy of the eye
• 20 pages on the anatomy of the ears, mouth and nose
• 30 pages on ageing faces
• about 50 pages equally split between expressions (happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust) and stages of life (babies, small children, tweens, teenagers, old age). And, yes, the old age bit repeats a lot from the previous chapter.

So it’s an anatomy-based book on drawing heads and faces. Despite there being so many drawings and so little text in the book, it packs a huge punch. I’ve just finished making notes on this one and those notes are two or three times as long as they’ve been for other books as thick as this one. All of the tips and ideas on the book are referenced back to all the different bones, muscles and cartilages that we’re introduced to in the more clinical sections of the book and it really works. This is the first time I’ve read an anatomy-based book and this was far more interesting than I was expecting, I’ve read books about how to draw faces and about where the shadows are and how to draw them but this book tells me why the shadows are there. And somehow, at the end of the book, I’ve come out feeling more observant. Just watching Dragons’ Den, The Apprentice and Star Trek last night (Thursday nights are a writeoff at the moment) I found myself looking so closely at faces, at the eyes, the mouths, the noses. When I say looking closely, I mean I’m looking at the eyelids, the shadows they case, the tear troughs below the lower eyelids, the anti-tragus in the ear. The book has changed how I see the world.

My one minor criticism of the book is that it’s not always easy to relate what Oliver’s saying in the text to what I see in his drawings. Maybe future editions might benefit from some extra text under the drawings, pointing our attention to particular features, maybe even putting little rings around important bits, even if this ruins the artwork. But that really is a minor criticism because this book easily scores five palettes. It approaches the head and face from a completely different direction. I don’t just understand the head and face better (through all the anatomy information) but I’m also looking at people differently and finding myself looking forward to doing some more detailed portraiture later in the year with either coloured pencils or charcoal. I’d still put forward Betty Edwards as the best place for a beginner to learn about drawing, but this is a great book to help experienced portrait artists to take their work to a new level.

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You can find this book and more reviews of it at Amazon UK here.  As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.