To all artists looking to improve their anatomy

[sayuri]

A little while ago I bought a few art books, and fell in love with one of them. It's called Figure Drawing: Design and Invention by Micheal Hampton. A lot of the time, anatomy tutorials will explain HOW but not WHY. The book is rooted in basic art theory, such as perspective and line flow. One of the reasons I like it was that it taught very similarly to my art teacher. It also doesn't have a defined 'difficulty', so to speak. The beginning of the book is very simple, and focuses on form and gesture. It gets more complex with each chapter, but if you master the skills in the previous section, you'll be amazed at how much your skills improve. I know a lot of people who learned anatomy just through contour line drawing, or drawing what they saw without considering the body's structure. I just felt like sharing since it's the book that really spoke to me and how I learn.

Here's a link with some screenshots of the book: http://parkablogs.com/content/book-revi ... -invention
And here is the amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0615272819

I feel bad spamming with a thread dedicated to a single book, so feel free to share some other resources you found helpful

[Fawn]

Eh, that books okay, but I have many that are better that you can get for much cheaper (and sometimes free)

The BEST one I've found is from the 50's and I got it at a used book store, you can get it online from Amazon for $10 (it should be worth 100 with the content in it). Probably the best book I've ever read for anatomy. There's a LOT of text that goes with it, but you don't necessarily need to read it to be able to learn, the detailed diagrams of body parts are self-explanatory. Speaking of the diagrams, they compare body parts to simple objects you probably already know how to draw (like stumps and balls, ect) to help you understand the form.

You can preview it here: http://books.google.com/books?id=kTathH ... &q&f=false

For more advanced figure drawing Loomis is the best. You can read it here for free on Scribd: http://books.google.com/books?id=kTathH ... &q&f=false

But, if you like the block-y kind of anatomy like in the book you linked, Bridgeman is also great: http://www.scribd.com/doc/6692986/bridg ... -from-life (I'm guessing that artist was inspired by him)

The thing about anatomy books today is that they're usually just rehashings of what artists have learned in the past. The authors of those books most likely learned from the books I've linked here (a lot of these books are used to teach artists professionally), and are just selling "new" versions of what they learned for profit. The human body hasn't changed much in the last hundred years, so using old books doesn't hurt at all xD You'll also save money and probably get more out of it.