art book

Crash Into Me

I’ve always been a sucker for shamelessly pulling song titles from my favorite artists for my work, and I feel like this Dave Matthews Band ditty is just right for where I’m going today.

In my last post, I talked about how sometimes something that you don’t want to happen can push you to do something really positive. Well, last week I was in a car accident in my zippy little car, which is out of commission at the moment, and that leads me to the negative action leading to a positive outcome.

In January I started working on a book– my first book! I always thought my first book would be a novel, or a children’s book, or a comic book, or… anything other than an art technique book. However, inspiration struck while I was working on a slide deck for the class I will be teaching this summer at the International Association for Identification’s 103rd Annual Conference. While I was building my slide deck I realized I had a whole lot more to say about my technique than a slideshow could possibly hold. So I started making a book. Like you do.

 The unglamorous side of being a freelance artist is that sometimes you juggle a few different gigs just to keep things afloat- one of my gigs was heavily dependent on my car, which will at the very least be out of commission for a few weeks.. so I thought, “What else can I do?”, and I thought of my book, just sitting and waiting to be shared…

About the Book

“Achieving Realistic Faces” was created specifically to aid Forensic Artists in speeding up and improving their skills in graphite, though it would benefit any artist who wants to improve their pencil work. In this book I lay out my shortcuts and faster ways to achieve high level results in graphite. I’ve combined my favorite and most used tips and tricks that I’ve amassed over a lifetime of being obsessed with portraiture and wanting to depict the face as I see it. My background in fine art and illustration comes together with tips for creating lifelike results, even if you don’t have a reference to work from. These techniques can be used in composite drawing, post-mortem depictions, or just drawing for the sake of depicting a face.

This book is broken up into exercises, cheat sheets for quick reference (on subjects like depicting different hair textures and wrinkles) and an in depth follow along portrait so you can see step by step how I achieve results like this (and how you can too):

I outline preferred supplies, set-up and some ways to re-think how you’re looking at the face. Why am I qualified to teach you anything? Probably because this is pretty much all I do. I’ve been creating portraits on a professional level for nearly a decade, with classical art training before that. More than my experience though, the thing that made me think “Maybe I should write all this down sometime…” is the fact that I keep getting asked to explain what the heck I’m doing when I work around other artists. I have a somewhat unorthodox approach to creating portraits, that I feel is more intuitive and I know lends itself to speeding things up. My approach is a blend of classical attitudes matched with illustrative speed– classical artists want to get it right, illustrators want to it on time. I want to teach you how to do both.

I’m offering “Achieving Realistic Faces” as an e-book initially, though I hope to do a print run eventually. You can buy the book here. If you know anyone you think would benefit from a new look at drawing in graphite, please pass this on!

Ready to jump in? Get your e-book for $15!

This link will take you to PayPal, once I receive your payment I will email your copy to the email address you provide!