Drawing Faeries: A Believer's Guide

Drawing Faeries: A Believer's Guide is a mixture of drawing-book and story-book, a sketchbook from an imaginary visit to Fairyland. Christopher Hart blends cute anecdotes about Faeries with sketches and drawings, including tips on Faery proportion, features and movement.

If you enjoy Christopher Hart's drawing style and are fairly open to loose interpretation of fairy lore, then you'll enjoy this book. It is fun, lighthearted and fresh.

Chistopher Hart is an accomplished cartoonist who has published a plethora of drawing books, and his experience shows in the clean, crisp line of his drawing and expert handling of action and expression. This book is alittle different from your average 'how to draw' book, with amusing anecdotes of 'faery life' mixed in among the sketches, which are drawn as though truly observational. Hart sketches Faeries at work and play, and drawing scenes from faery domestic life, along with their animal friends. He creates a range of characters although all have that distinctive Hart style. Differences between Faery and Human are often used as an example, though this might only be really useful if you are already confident at drawing people. Hart shows how to draw Faery faces from various angles using curved lines to place the features, as well as faces with various expressions and emotions.

Most of the drawings in the book are drawn using a simplified stick-figure or ball-and-stick construction so that even quite inexperienced young artists should be able to follow them step-by-step. There are also many large line-drawings that invite coloring-in, as well as coloured examples adding vibrance throughout the pages.

I was surprised at the lack of space devoted to the important topic of wings, though some of the faeries in the book are indeed winged. Perhaps I'm a bit 'old school' on this, expecting Fairies to have wings - though my young daughter told me she thought that Hart's Faeries look more like Elves - and it depends on your expectations.