Comicartistresourceblog is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com
If there was one question I would say is the most prevalent amongst anyone wanting to learn to draw comics, it’s what figure drawing/anatomy book should I but to learn from. That is not an easy question to answer because there is no one all encompassing resource that you can buy that will teach you everything. There are some books that have loads of information in them and require in depth study in order to be able to utilize the material. Others have general overviews of the basics to get you up and running. The truth is if you want to draw comics, you will pull information from a variety of sources. Books are a great resource that you can constantly refer to when you need reference for anatomy or a particular pose. Studying from real life through figure drawing classes and just daily observation of people should also make up part of your study program. Since the title of this article is about anatomy books I am going to focus on those books that I feel are the most helpful. Keep in mind this is not the be all end all list of books as new ones come out all the time, and you as an artist should investigate new books to see if you can learn anything from them.
So what books should I start with? Good question! I asked myself that same question back when I wanted to start acquiring reference books. Unfortunately it was the early 90’s and the internet did not exist so I couldn’t just look it up on Google or Amazon. What we did have back then was a magazine called Wizard which was a comic industry fanzine. They would always have interviews with the hot artist of the month where they would ask standard questions like how did you break in, did you go to art school etc. On occasion some of the artist would mention the books they use to study from. One of the books mentioned constantly was called Dynamic Figure Drawing by Burne Hogarth.
Of course I ran to the local book store to hunt down this tome of anatomical wisdom. When I got it home I remember looking through it fascinated by the drawings contained within. Beautiful rendered drawings of both male and female figures in all sorts of contorted poses. Hogarth was an illustrator and teacher and worked on the Tarzan comic strip. I learned that these drawings were gathered from the various figure drawing lectures Burne Hogarth would give at the schools he taught at, in particular the School of Visual Arts in NYC which he co-founded with Silas Rhodes. The school was established in 1947 as The Cartoonists and Illustrators School and eventually was renamed The School of Visual Arts in 1956.
Many artist from Marvel, DC and Image recommended this book as well as some of the other Hogarth books that were available such as Dynamic Anatomy which actually came out in 1958 and preceeded Dynamic Figure Drawing which came later in the 70’s.
In addition to Dynamic Anatomy and Dynamic Figure Drawing, other books in the Hogarth series are Drawing Dynamic Hands, Drawing the Human Head, Dynamic Light and Shade, Dynamic Wrinkles and Drapery and The Arcane Eye of Hogarth which is a sketchbook of Hogarth’s pencil drawings and not particularly focused on anatomy. These books are a great starting point to build you library of anatomy reference.
The first time I heard of the name George Bridgman it was in a video called Stan Lee Presents The Comic Book Greats Volume #10 with Jim Lee. It was a video series that focused on a particular “hot” artist in the early 90’s and would discuss how the artist goes about drawing comics. You can view the video on youtube here. Jim Lee was demonstrating a gesture drawing and mentioned he wasn’t someone who memorized all of the muscles, but was more into the gesture and studied George Bridgman. Jim Lee, at the time was a monster of comic art. Image Comics was newly formed and in the comic book world, Jim was basically a rock star. When I saw this video my first thought was, hell if Jim Lee uses this book, then I need to get it asap! So back to the book store I went to hunt down George Bridgman’s Life Drawing.
The first thing you’ll notice is that the drawings in this book are very crude. What I mean by that is in comparison to the Hogarth books, the drawings contained here are very simplistic line drawings. However, that is the beauty and power of his books. Bridgman used the least amount of lines as possible to illustrate the gesture of the human figure. He used basic shapes and showed how they wedged and interlocked into each other to form the masses of the body and how they work with and relate to one another. Bridgman showed how these forms create 3 dimensional shapes that construct the body. Bridgman was truly a master of gesture and anatomy. Other famous artists that he had taught in his classes are names you may know, such as Will Eisner artist of The Spirit comic, author of Comics and Sequential Art and the man who The Eisner Award is named after. Andrew Loomis, illustrator, author and art instructor whose books I will cover in part 2 of this article was also a student of Bridgman, as was Gifford Beal, Paul Manship, Edmund Ward, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Norman Rockwell. This book along with some of Bridgmans’s other books such as Constructive Anatomy , Heads Features and Faces, and The Book of 100 Hands should all occupy a spot on your reference book shelf.
That is it for part 1 of this article. In part 2 I’ll go over a few older books and some more recent ones that I feel can be very beneficial to the aspiring artist.
