Here are 59 books that Anatomy for the Artist fans have personally recommended if you like
Anatomy for the Artist.
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Drawing and painting people has been my passion and my profession for a couple of decades now. Fine art, comic books, animation, illustration – as long as I'm drawing people, I'm happy. I love the challenge of trying to capture (or create) a living, breathing, thinking person on paper. And I love talking about art books with other artists. Which ones are great, which ones miss the mark, which ones have tiny hidden gems in them. This list is a mix of books I love, and books I heartily recommend.
Steve Huston is one of my heroes. I love his art and I love how he talks about art. Steve walks with his feet firmly on the ground and lavishes the feel of the dirt between his toes. He talks about the lofty goals of being human and creating art in the most down-to-earth, practical ways.
And that's not a side-note to his how-to-draw book, that's the central message of this how-to-draw book. See the world, be in the world, trust and love your own senses, make contributions to the world. This book is filled with gorgeous drawings and a warm invitation to ways of seeing and drawing and conceptualizing the human figure.
Figure Drawing for Artists: Making Every Mark Count is not a typical drawing instruction book; it explains the two-step process behind juggernauts like DreamWorks, WB and Disney.
Though there are many books on drawing the human figure, none teach how to draw a figure from the first few marks of the quick sketch to the last virtuosic stroke of the finished masterpiece, let alone through a convincing, easy-to-understand method.
That changes now!
In Figure Drawing for Artists: Making Every Mark Count, award-winning fine artist Steve Huston shows beginners and pros alike the two foundational concepts behind the greatest masterpieces in…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Drawing and painting people has been my passion and my profession for a couple of decades now. Fine art, comic books, animation, illustration – as long as I'm drawing people, I'm happy. I love the challenge of trying to capture (or create) a living, breathing, thinking person on paper. And I love talking about art books with other artists. Which ones are great, which ones miss the mark, which ones have tiny hidden gems in them. This list is a mix of books I love, and books I heartily recommend.
This book really “clicks” with how I imagine the figure and how I draw. There are a hundred ways to learn to draw, and you need to find the one that clicks with how your brain works. But ways that don't click still strengthen you. Even if Hampton's approach isn't the right one for you in the long run, learning it and trying it out will only make you a better artist. There's great stuff here about visualizing form, and simplifying form while keeping everything living and breathing instead of stiff and posed. This is a great book for people who want to draw from imagination as well as from observation.
Figure Drawing: Design and Invention is an instructional figure drawing book geared towards the novice and experienced artist alike. This book emphasizes a simplified understanding of surface anatomy, in order to clarify the mechanics of the figure, facilitate invention, and ultimately create a skill-set that can be successfully applied to other media. In addition, this book focuses very strongly on practical usage, making sure the artist is able to assimilate the steps presented here into a cohesive working process. (Fourth printing, September 2011)
Figure Drawing: Design and Invention is an instructional figure drawing book geared towards the novice and experienced…
Drawing and painting people has been my passion and my profession for a couple of decades now. Fine art, comic books, animation, illustration – as long as I'm drawing people, I'm happy. I love the challenge of trying to capture (or create) a living, breathing, thinking person on paper. And I love talking about art books with other artists. Which ones are great, which ones miss the mark, which ones have tiny hidden gems in them. This list is a mix of books I love, and books I heartily recommend.
This is my list so I wanted to include this book that was so key to me. This is an art book, but it's a very math-y art book with very few illustrations and almost no how-to step-by-step illustrations. It has pages and pages of “to draw a line from 30 degrees above the horizon and 15 degrees to the left of center etc. etc. etc.” text. It's a dense read, but it was the book that solved six-point perspective for me, which was a topic I'd been working feverishly on for a solid year and couldn't quite nail on my own. It really opened up my understanding of perspective, especially curvilinear perspective drawing. I owe this book (and Flocon and Barre) a lot.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Drawing and painting people has been my passion and my profession for a couple of decades now. Fine art, comic books, animation, illustration – as long as I'm drawing people, I'm happy. I love the challenge of trying to capture (or create) a living, breathing, thinking person on paper. And I love talking about art books with other artists. Which ones are great, which ones miss the mark, which ones have tiny hidden gems in them. This list is a mix of books I love, and books I heartily recommend.
You're drawing, you're painting, you're doing whatever you do – you're making things that weren't there before. You're creating images, you're creating visual stories. Sometimes creation is a thrill, and sometimes it's a bizarre disorienting struggle. Nobody expresses the creative life quite like Mr.Earbrass (and Edward Gorey). Is it a how-to book? No. Is it a how-not-to book? It's not really that either. It's a story about an eccentric novelist crafting his latest book. I give this weird little storybook as a gift to artist and writer friends all the time. Everyone I've given it to just raves about it.
On November 18th of alternate years Mr Earbrass begins writing 'his new novel.' Weeks ago he chose its title at random from a list of them he keeps in a little green note-book. It being tea-time of the 17th, he is alarmed not to have thought of a plot to which The Unstrung Harp might apply, but his mind will keep reverting to the last biscuit on the plate." So begins what the Times Literary Supplement called "a small masterpiece." TUH is a look at the literary life and its "attendant woes: isolation, writer's block, professional jealousy, and plain boredom."…
Writing is a big part of my life. One of the great joys of writing my first books was interviewing many of the inspiring scientists who were involved in the discoveries, some of whom are no longer with us. Writing helps me take stock of the big picture of this vast human endeavor. I want to explain to everyone what we know and what we don’t know about immune health. I am the Head of Life Sciences and Professor of Immunology at Imperial College London.
Bill Bryson is, to me, one of the greatest all-time nonfiction authors, and it’s just wonderful that he wrote this book about the human body. It is inspiring, surprising, and laugh-out-loud funny.
There’s even a short bit in this book about him visiting my own University research lab!
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Bill Bryson, bestselling author of A Short History of Nearly Everything, takes us on a head-to-toe tour of the marvel that is the human body—with a new afterword for this edition.
Bill Bryson once again proves himself to be an incomparable companion as he guides us through the human body—how it functions, its remarkable ability to heal itself, and (unfortunately) the ways it can fail. Full of extraordinary facts (your body made a million red blood cells since you started reading this) and irresistible Brysonesque anecdotes, The Body will lead you to a deeper understanding…
I didn’t always know that I wanted to be a doctor, perhaps because there were no doctors in my family, and I did not even realize that I wanted to (or could) go to medical school until I was almost done with college. Once I did realize this, however, it became immediately obvious to me that being a physician (a surgeon) was what I wanted to dedicate my life’s work to, and I have been passionate about it ever since. Probably the topics I am most passionate about after surgery are education, books, reading, poetry, etc., so this book lets both these passions dovetail beautifully!
The
thing that I really like about this book is that it is literally built around a
3-D model of the body embedded in the center of the book, so that as you turn
the pages, you uncover different layers of the body, since the model is built
in layers, each attached to the board-book-style pages. So, opening the cover (the skin, as it
were) of the book reveals a page on the dermal system, and the skeletal system,
and as you turn the next page, the ribs come with the page to reveal some of
the internal organs, and so on.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’m a science and technology journalist who has reported on neurotech and bioelectricity for over 15 years, for publications includingNew Scientist, IEEE Spectrum and Quartz. After a formative experience in a DARPA brain-stimulation experiment, I began to dig into the history and science of bioelectricity, trying to understand both the science at the level of membrane biophysics, and the history and psychology of how biology lost custody of electricity. My resulting book is an effort to create a repository of the real, rigorous studies that have advanced our understanding of this fascinating science at an accelerating rate in the past 20 to 40 years - and what the new science means about the future.
This book tells the story of how bioelectricity was finally accepted in modern neuroscience, how it interacts with biochemical elements of the nervous signal, and how its manipulation led to great medica and scientific advances in the late 20th century.
The author knew several of the leading figures who made these discoveries and provides personal anecdotes about them, as well as illuminating episodes from the history of neuroscience.
What happens during a heart attack? Can someone really die of fright? What is death, anyway? How does electroshock treatment affect the brain? What is consciousness? The answers to these questions lie in the electrical signals constantly traveling through our bodies, driving our thoughts, our movements, and even the beating of our hearts.
The history of how scientists discovered the role of electricity in the human body is a colorful one, filled with extraordinary personalities, fierce debates, and brilliant experiments. Moreover, present-day research on electricity and ion channels has created one of the most exciting fields in science, shedding light…
I have always been interested in the overview, the joined-up, the patterns, trends, and directions rather than the details of things. As a biologist, this led me to study animal behaviour rather than molecules. Great things come from the cross-overs between disciplines. Bridges are there to be made between islands of knowledge. Both my books (Wild Health and Another Self) are books that bridge a huge divide between knowledge acquired from reductionist research and that gained by experience. We humans use both.
I loved the way Guy Claxton joined the dots between so many separate scientific disciplines.
He is (I believe) a professor of linguistics, yet he dove into human biology with clarity and gusto, presenting an accessible description of an extremely complex concept—that intelligence incorporates our whole body, not just our brain.
An enthralling exploration that upends the prevailing view of consciousness and demonstrates how intelligence is literally embedded in the palms of our hands
If you think that intelligence emanates from the mind and that reasoning necessitates the suppression of emotion, you'd better think again-or rather not "think" at all. In his provocative new book, Guy Claxton draws on the latest findings in neuroscience and psychology to reveal how our bodies-long dismissed as mere conveyances-actually constitute the core of our intelligent life. From the endocrinal means by which our organs communicate to the instantaneous decision-making prompted by external phenomena, our bodies…
I've been drawing for over 68 years and carrying a sketchbook for over 60 of those years. I've seen success as an author, I'm an award-winning illustrator of books and magazines and animated many classic Disney features. Am I an expert on sketching humans and animals? ...No. I'm constantly learning in my effort to capture humans and animals in action by following the basic principles of drawing as they apply to quick sketching. My learning is aided by these books as I prepare lesson plans or the encouragement and inspiration found within their pages. I'm married to LaVonne, my high school sweetheart of 50 years, and have three grown children and six grandchildren.
Gorgeous illustrations abound in this through presentation of the anatomy of human and animal bodies. Practical application, diagrams, charts, text, definitions, and more have made this coffee table size book a go-to reference for me over the years.
Comparative anatomy of humans and animals has been a primary interest and subject of study of mine. I teach this topic and it is constantly brought into use in my quick sketching, illustration, and animation. I consider this a must-have for anyone interested in human and animal anatomy.
Designed for both professional and amateur artists, Cyclopedia Anatomicae is an essential guide to mastering the fundamentals of anatomical drawing. In addition to the human figure, it covers horses, dogs, cats, pigs, apes and more. Detailed, fully annotated illustrations of the skeletal, joint, and muscular systems clarify the proportions of each body type and lay the foundation for reproducing movements with true-to-life accuracy. With more than 1,500 illustrations, tips on drawing techniques, and informative explanations of the basics on human and animal anatomy, Cyclopedia Anatomicae provides the helpful guidance any artist can use.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
Born at the base of the beautiful Wasatch Mountains, I began exploring and sketching the world—as most children do—at a very early age. I continued to pursue not only my artistic path through traditional schooling, higher education, and endless hours of practice, but also my love of storytelling. Intrigued by Science Fiction and Fantasy, many of my projects reflect elements of the fantastic, but I also appreciate the beauty and elegance in fine art masterpieces. I studied illustration and graphic design at Utah State University and the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. I currently live in Salt Lake City with my beautiful wife and four boys, where I continue to write, paint and draw regularly.
This is the artist's anatomy book I grew up studying throughout high school and college, and it goes deep into the structural and anatomical anatomy of the body. It gives good illustrative examples of the skeletal and muscular systems as well as providing a few photographic references for both male and female anatomy. It is a pretty old volume, having been originally published in 1957, but the principles remain the same and it holds up pretty well. For anyone serious about learning to not only draw or paint from life, but also the imagination, I highly recommend this foundational and educational reference guide.
"I recommend Fritz Schider's Atlas of Anatomy for Artists to those who wish to increase their understanding of the human figure." — Robert Beverly Hale, Lecturer on Anatomy, Art Students League of New York. Adopted by Pratt Institute, Cleveland School of Art, Art Students League of New York, and others.
For more than forty years, this book has been recognized as the most thorough reference book on art anatomy in the world. Schider's complete, historical text is accompanied by a wealth of anatomical illustrations, plus a variety of plates showcasing master artists and their classic works on the anatomy of…
