Customer Reviews

How to Draw People: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners with 10 Projects

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I have taught art for the last 20 years. I teach both 11-18 year olds and adults and bought this book because the most difficult area for beginners is learning to draw the human figure. Few other books manage to help beginners; they usually assume prior knowledge and understanding of the subject, but this book begins with basics, showing and explaining to readers how to look, see, understand shape, negative space, proportion, structure, tone, fabric folds and texture. At any point, readers can stop and either leave their drawings or carry on to extremely detailed finish. The variety of subjects and materials used are also refreshing and with every project, there is an alternative picture for readers to work from and an example of the original drawing in an alternative medium.

I wish I'd had this book when I was learning to draw, or at least over the last 20 years since I've been teaching. Many of my students of all ages and levels have responded brilliantly to this book and have improved speedily and well. I would recommend it to anyone and will certainly buy more books by this author.

"How to Draw People" by Susie Hodge

I have learned by now, to sense an "alert" at certain key words found on the cover of drawing books, that indicate gimmicky advertising promises, and these kind of books never measure up to their purpose. Warning Words such as: "ultimate," or "complete-guide-to" or "absolute" and so forth. Good drawing books never use extreme claims. The Warning Word in "How to Draw People" is on the back cover:

"...the ESSENTIAL starting point for beginners who want to learn the basics and enjoy drawing."

So, with the word "ESSENTIAL," the author/publisher is telling us that this method is EXCLUSIVE of all other drawing methods. None of the other methods will work. Only this method. This method is the very ....ESSENCE.

The back cover goes on to clarify:

"10 practical demonstrations broken down into STEP-BY-STEP STAGES".


So much for how the publisher saw this book. Allow me to tell you how I saw it. On the page of each "step-by-step" lesson, I saw illustrations that I could never draw, but worse, 1/2 to 3/4ths of the lesson pages were full of wordy text, attempting to clarify what the author's illustrations could not teach.

On page 13 there are 2 illustrations of the SIMPLIFIED FIGURETTE, or BLOCK PUPPETS. Mind you now, that's 2 pictures, and NOT 2 pages full of pictures of the human figure image that most books use many times over to show the human figure sitting, standing, bending, and/or lying down. NOT a single SIMPLIFIED FIGURETTE is used to show any kind of human ACTION, or activity at all. No ball-throwing, no jumping, no kicking, no bending around, no punching. Nothing. Nada. Ninguno. Zip. This book is supposed to be ONLY about drawing PEOPLE and nothing else. But they are people who just sit or stand like posing for some photograph.

The author is limited to using only one single style of drawing. There are several styles or methods possible. Most drawing books show a little of each. For example, you can use blocks, or cubes, or triangles to roughly draw the human figures. You might use sticks, or even OVALS. Then there are Line Drawings, and Gesture Drawings. This author relies almost entirely on Line Drawings Only. So if you hope to get a broad or general view such as most beginner books teach, you will not find that here. The author's drawings are rather perfect. So if a beginner tries to draw perfect LINE DRAWINGS, and fails, how is that beginner going to feel? Just terrible. I know I would. That's a method of STEP-BY-STEP instruction that I call very hurtful to a BEGINNER.

This book is so strange, that it does not even mention drawing on ordinary NEWSPRINT [the common drawing paper that is the same stuff that newspapers are printed on] in the section on MATERIALS. I just reviewed another book today that says: "Newsprint is invaluable for sketching and preliminary work." Go figure.

Many BEGINNER artists are children. With all the wordy text on the lesson pages, this would not be an easy drawing book for children at all.

This book is mainly a group of images with the author discussing how to draw them step by step. However, there are very few tips about "how" to successfully draw them. The biggest tip in this book, which is repeated several times, is the number of head lengths in an adult or child's body, which IS a good tip, however I'd have expected manymore. The rest of the "tips" are more like: "draw this and be careful not to..." or "when sketching this use the negative space to find the shapes" - these are all good tips, if you're in a classroom with a teacher who is pointing at your drawing, but not helpful or useful in a book. This book is light on information.

Finally, the thing that made me realize this just wasn't going to work was the fact that the author's drawings aren't really that good, in particular the faces are not drawn accurately to the photo images.

I'm sure there are better books out there.

If you cannot absolutely draw a line, maybe this book is worth it, but for the decent beginner drawer, this is a joke. The author is mediocre and her drawings off the photos are just a pathetic attempt. Very mediocre book. Illustration is not the authors forte.