On Sight Size Portraiture

In this fully revised and expanded book, Nicholas Beer examines the sight-size portrait method, in which the artist stands back at a distance to view the picture and sitter side-by-side and to scale. Nick demonstrates the technique in a series of projects that culminate in portrait painting. There are also sections on the history of sight-size, early treatises on portraiture, and the 'philosophy' of seeing. This new edition also includes a 'starts and studies' section, which looks at a series of unfinished paintings in detail to analyse the thought processes and techniques of great artists. Includes; an historical overview of the technique and introduction to the traditional language of drawing and painting; the limited palette and the philosophy of seeing; a step-by-step sequence with practical instruction, and examples of great masters ranging from Van Dyck to Sargent. Superbly illustrated with 152 colour illustrations including step-by-step sequence.

Within The Sight-Size Cast is everything you ever wanted to know about Sight-Size cast drawing and painting, impressionistic seeing, and the ways in which many of the ateliers that stem from R. H. Ives Gammell and Richard Lack teach their students. You can learn how to see through Sight-Size with Darren Rousar's book, The Sight-Size Cast.

The first book of its kind, "Cast Drawing Using the Sight-Size Approach" teaches the student a systematic way to meet the challenges of drawing.

Drawing the Head for Artists is the definitive modern guide to drawing the human head and portrait, featuring the classic mediums and methods of the Old Masters. Written by celebrated portrait artist and veteran studio instructor Oliver Sin, this richly informative and beautifully illustrated volume leads readers step-by-step through his method, from establishing a point of view to applying the timeless principles for creating an accurate and expressive likeness. Among the topics covered: Essential Materials & Techniques:Learn about necessary supplies and basic drawing techniques, including hatching, various stroke styles, and blending. Applying the Essentials: Explore how the concepts of sight-sizing, value, negative space/shapes, and plane changes factor into a portrait’s underlying structure. Techniques for Creating Depth & Dimension:Investigate how contrasting shapes, overlapping forms, and linear and atmospheric perspective are used to enhance depth. Creating the Illusion of Three Dimensions: Examine how edges—contours as well as changes in value—are used to convey three-dimensional form. Brimming with striking images that document all the phases and details of the author’s process, Drawing the Head for Artists inspires and informs all artists, from aspiring to accomplished, on how to successfully portray the physical subtleties and emotional eloquence of the human face. The For Artists series expertly guides and instructs artists at all skill levels who want to develop their classical drawing and painting skills and create realistic and representational art.

The first major examination of Anthony van Dyck's work as a portraitist and an essential resource on this aspect of his illustrious career This landmark volume is a comprehensive survey of the portrait drawings, paintings, and prints of Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), one of the most celebrated portraitists of all time. His supremely elegant style and ability to convey a sense of a sitter's inner life made him a favored portraitist among high-ranking figures and royalty across Europe, as well as among his fellow artists and art enthusiasts. Showcasing the full range of Van Dyck's fascinating international career with more than 100 works, this catalogue celebrates the artist's versatility, inventiveness, and influential approach to portraiture. Works include preparatory drawings and oil sketches that shed light on Van Dyck's working process, prints that allowed his work to reach a wider audience, and grand painted portraits. Some of the masterpieces are drawn from the exceptional holdings of The Frick Collection, while other works are presented here for the first time. Also included are drawings by some of Van Dyck's contemporaries--including his teacher Peter Paul Rubens--that illuminate the lineage of his working method. With insightful contributions by a team of international scholars, this unparalleled study of Van Dyck offers a compelling case for the distinctiveness and importance of the artist's work.

"As long as humans have been alive, we have drawn." ~Justin Maas Drawing is the most essential of all visual arts. Everyone, from sculptors to painters, draws in one form or another. It is also the simplest and most affordable form of artistic expression. All you need is a pencil and paper to make something magical. But to create a successful portrait, one must understand how to capture a person’s likeness--their spirit--and portray it in graphite. In Drawing Realistic Pencil Portraits, artist and teacher Justin Maas provides a step-by-step guide for both novice and experience portraitists looking to enhance their skillsets. His tried-and-true techniques for mastering the basics and accurately rendering proportion, placement and nuance when drawing the head and face will help you add energy and life to your drawings and create recognizable and moving portraits. In this book: • Lessons in drawing basics, including value, line, shadow, light and anatomy • How to work from both reference photographs and live models, plus tips for selecting your subjects • Step-by-step demos to create crucial features, such as eyes, ears, and hair • Methods for building successful portraits, including the grid method, the tracing method and the author's own Maas method • 15 detailed step-by-step portrait-drawing demos with subjects of different ages, genders and ethnicities • A gallery of additional portrait examples in both black-and-white and full color

Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World is the first book to focus on the individualized portrayal of enslaved people from the time of Europe's full engagement with plantation slavery in the late sixteenth century to its final official abolition in Brazil in 1888. While this period saw the emergence of portraiture as a major field of representation in Western art, 'slave' and 'portraiture' as categories appear to be mutually exclusive. On the one hand, the logic of chattel slavery sought to render the slave's body as an instrument for production, as the site of a non-subject. Portraiture, on the contrary, privileged the face as the primary visual matrix for the representation of a distinct individuality. Essays address this apparent paradox of 'slave portraits' from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, probing the historical conditions that made the creation of such rare and enigmatic objects possible and exploring their implications for a more complex understanding of power relations under slavery.

Chronicles the life and career of innovative contemporary artist Chuck Close, focusing on how he developed his pioneering ideas of scale, form, and color through the theme of portraiture.