Draw from Your Head: A Step-By-Step System for Drawing the Human Figure Without a Model

Rating:
Summary: What a shame it's out of print
Review: Every so often, you come across a situation where you wonder how and why an excellent book went out of print. This is one of those situations. Draw From Your Head is perhaps one of the best, most innovative approaches to human anatomy that has ever been written. Rather than present you with a dull collection of skeletal and muscle diagrams accompanied by dry text, Doug Jamiesen teaches you about the human figure by presenting you a number of exercises in which you gradually build up the human body from scratch, step by step, to completion-- first starting with the skeleton, then finally working your way up through all the major muscle groups. For example, with lesson one, you first learn how to draw a stick figure representing the human skeleton. Then with each successive chapter, you learn about the biceps, the triceps, the abdominal muscles and so on, which you then add to this stick figure in a series of steps, until you reach the end of the book when you will have added every important muscle of the human body to the stick figure. This approach to learning about the human body is so much fun and so innovative that by the time you finish the book, you will not only be surprised to find that you have learned how to draw the human figure from imagination, you will also be shocked to find that you have a surprising and practical artistic knowledge of human anatomy. And guess what-- it was all done painlessly! This I why I must recommend "Draw from Your Head" for the serious art student. This book, which I still have on my shelf after years of use, will prove so invaluable to you, you'll wonder how you could live without it. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Rating:
Summary: extremely practical and helpful
Review: This is the first book I'd recommend to anyone wanting to study artistic anatomy. After slogging through other anatomy books,I found this one explaining everything I needed to know with simplicity and thoroughness. Not that other books are without merit, but this is the place to start. A treasure if you can find it!