Unusually for me, I started Drawing for Dummies at the very beginning and read it through to the end, doing many of the exercises. There are lots of useful hints and tips but the main thing is that Drawing for Dummies follows the usual Dummies style in being practical hands-on: do this, do that and hey, you can do it! And hey, I can. Brenda Hoddinott also gives us permission to use a ruler to draw a straight line which is a welcome relief from all the drawing books saying you can't do this, you can't do that. Some of us need all the help we can get. And if Leonardo wasn't too proud to draw with a grid, I don't see why I should be.

Very very good. Probably the best drawing book I've bought. A book rich in drawings and text, Bridget Woods develops your  skills via copious exercises to develop different aspects and to help you to see life drawing through the eyes of an artist. Each exercise is introduced by telling you what you will learn, how to do it, how long to take, how to arrange your model if you have one, and so on. The approach is detailed and thorough [if it's thorough how could it not be detailed? Ed] and the effect is as if you have a gentle and patient expert and coach at your elbow encouraging and helping you. It's a book to read to learn and to look at to be inspired. But perhaps the most important reason I think it's my most helpful book is that most of my early successful pictures of people were either copies of pictures of photos from Life Drawing, or inspired by it.

This book is an inspiration to the student of pencil drawing. There are numerous wonderful pencil drawings - mostly of buildings and landscapes - and copious notes giving the background to the pictures and tips for how to approach your own drawing. You can buy the book to marvel at the pictures or to learn from the text. Watson's narrative is gentle - it's as if you are being shown new tricks by your favourite uncle.

There are a number of things I love about this book. I love the drawings in it which are mostly of people and body parts. I love the selections of pictures from the great artists to illustrate different points and techniques. It makes me want to draw like Seurat and Ingres and it helps me to understand Degas. (But I'm still completely mystified by Picasso.) And I like the physical quality of the book, the cover, the paper used and the typeface. It's a lovely book to pick up and look at for a while and feel inspired by.

Douglas Graves demonstrating drawing a facial portrait in 45 steps. Sounds complicated, and it is a bit, but seeing a portrait appear from a blank sheet of paper is interesting and seeing all the intermediate steps gives me confidence and ideas about how my half-finished portraits should be. In the early part of the book where he is discussing different facial characteristics the drawings he shows are those infuriating type which display a huge amount of character in a small fraction of the graphite I use in my pictures. If the sign of a great artist is maximum information conveyed by minimum ink/paint/graphite (and it probably isn't, I just made that up) then I have a long way to go.

Anyway, a book well worth examining if you want to draw facial likenesses.

A book to dip into and out of. Friend presents a series of pictures showing the typical difficulties and faults displayed by the novice artist and opposite shows the same scene drawn without these problems. Interspersed with these lessons are demonstrations of drawing different types of scene encouraging the reader to have a go.