Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

Don't judge this book by its cover!

Customer Rating:

I'm a sculptor, very interested in capturing expression, and have been looking for a good book of facial expressions for some time. I saw the title, ordered the book and was extremely disappointed when it arrived; the last thing I wanted was someone else's interpretations of facial muscles. I needed photographs of the real thing, so I set the book aside, intending to send it back. Then I took a class with a very well-known portrait sculptor, and was surprised to hear him recommend this same book. "But it only has pencil sketches!" I protested, "Shouldn't we use pictures of real people?" "Forget photographs. You need to actually read the book. Have you?" he asked, "You must READ it, every page. This is the best facial reference for the sculptor that I have ever found." I followed his advice, and he's right. Faigin is an extremely talented sketch artist and his drawings will teach you a lot, but the accompanying text is really what makes this book work. He's carefully catalogued what each of the muscle groups in the face is doing throughout the expression of an emotion, and the sketches simply show what he's talking about. The text explains WHY we recognize certain muscle positions as a particular expression, and helps us understand the relationships of muscles, tissue and skin when the face moves. Faigin starts with how facial muscles portray key emotions, then moves to comparisons of different muscle groups in subtler positions. For sculptors, it probably helps to have a 3D model of the facial muscles (in addition to a mirror) handy while reading this book. But it's such a rich store of information that you'll learn plenty without them.

Artist Must Have	Customer Rating:
This book is the best I have read about drawing portraits. You learn a lot from this book as it is in a format that is easy to understand.

Superb	Customer Rating:
The author and artist did a superb job in explaining the theory of emotion, and then his actual drawings provide an excellent guide to these basic emotions. This is a rare and unique combination.

Some very good, the rest very bad.

Customer Rating:

This book gives you an excellent overview of the anatomical structure of the human head. A distilled amount of studied and learned information. I'm sorry to say that the author is one that is better at teaching than drawing, because almost all of his example drawings are so badly executed that I found myself wondering how the heck it all went so wrong when he applied his own techniques to his subjects. I got rid of the hardbound paper cover for this book so that I would not be instantly "turned off" by the ones on the front and back of the dust jacket. The drawings themselves are so overworked to the extreme that words fail me. They look forced and do not consistently convey the emotion that the author attributes to them. I found myself "deflated" rather than inspired to use his techniques because of the example drawings (although this may not bother you as I tend to be a "hothouse plant" when it comes to quality and execution of ideas). Summing up: On the Pro side: A fine reference to add to your library for the biological anatomy of the head, both in proportion and a broken down "geometrical" approach of it's basic construction - On the Con side: a terribly uninspiring look at those references put to use in the authors overworked, unrealistic and extremely disappointing drawings.

A Favorite!

Customer Rating:

The Artist's Complete Guide to Facial Expression by Gary Faigin is one of my favorite art books because it isn't limited to a particular medium. My goal as an artist/illustrator is to portray people as realistically as possible, and this book is filled with hundreds of pictures of expressions along with the facial muscles that produce those expressions. The demonstrations show the artist how to portray even the subtlest emotion. But this book isn't just for artists whose style is realistic; artists who prefer cartooning can also benefit by understanding how to translate complex expressions into simple lines.