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In my last article Anatomy Books for Drawing Comics Part 1, I discussed books by Burne Hogarth and George Bridgman. Now I am going to jump over to a former student of Bridgman’s, Andrew Loomis. I honestly never heard the name Andrew Loomis until the early 2000’s. I was on a website called conceptart.org, which I don’t belive is around anymore. It’s a shame, as a lot industry professionals posted helpful content there. Anyway, I was reading a post about everyones favorite figure drawing/anatomy books and quite a few people mentioned a book called Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth by Andrew Loomis.
I had never heard of this book before nor did I know anything about Andrew Loomis. A quick background, Andrew Loomis (1892-1959) was an illustrator, author and art instructor whose work was featured in many magazines and advertisements. He is also known for publishing a series of art instruction books between the years 1939 to 1961. To complicate matters all of his books were long out of print. If you were able to find one in a mom and pop book store you were going to pay a pretty penny for it as the book was published in 1943. You could find scanned pdf versions on the internet, but they were not of the best quality. Luckily, around 2010 I believe, the demand for the books brought them back into print and they are now easily available.
Now, I had said in the first part of my anatomy book article that there was not just one book that was going to teach you everything, well this book comes pretty darn close! In Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth, Loomis put together a tome which covers so many concepts for drawing the figure. Things like proportion, drawing the mannequin, weight distribution, values, lighting, bones, muscles, drawing using landmarks, perspective, flat diagrams, movement and about 100 other things too long to list. It is a 208 page book full of beautiful illustrations and diagrams reminiscent of the type of illustrations found in magazine ads from the 30’s and 40’s. You could spend a few years studying everything in this book, but the information is so worth the investment in time.
Loomis put out several other books. They are all fantastic, but if you want to draw comics I would suggest Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth, Fun With A Pencil and Creative illustration.
Since I’ve covered the big three of Hogarth, Bridgman and Loomis, I thought I would move on to some of the more recent books that are making the rounds and have found favor with some of todays top artists.
Michael Hampton’s Figure Drawing Design and Invention is one of the newer books that a lot of artist from newbies to pro’s seem to really like.
I would have to agree with them as it is a really great book on the subject matter.
Hampton’s book is like a mix of Hogarth and Loomis. There are a lot of gestural line drawings mixed with traditional figure drawings. Then there are more diagrammatic drawings that isolate certain body parts and illustrate the structure and the mechanics of how the body part works. Most of these illustrations are color coded which makes for easy understanding of the material.
In general the books goal is to provide a simple understanding of anatomy in order to clarify the mechanics of the figure, help facilitate the invention of figures from imagination, and ultimately develop the artists skills to be successful across different media. Definitely a worthwile book to have in your reference library.
The next book I’m going to talk about is not your traditional figure drawing book, nor does it have to do with comic book illustration. Anatomy for Sculptors Understanding the Human Figure by Uldis Zarins with Sandis Kondrats is a book targeted at sculptors, particularly those sculpting digitally in ZBrush or Mudbox or any of the various modeling programs.
So why put this book in an article about figure drawing for comic book illustration? Because…..this book is awesome! The authors put a lot of thought into the material in this book in order to help sculptors learn how to portray convincing anatomy. The figure is presented as a whole but then broken down into parts in color coded illustrations that run the gamut from diagrammatic images to fully rendered figures.
For the aspiring comic book artist, this book is an easy reference guide on how to construct figures, what the masses of the body look like, how they are formed and how they work with one another. The illustrations are a combination of 3d sculpts, wireframe meshes and actual photographs. Sometimes all layered on top of one another to help illustrate how the layers of the body work. So while this book was created with 3D sculptors in mind, there is plenty of reference material to learn from for 2D artists.
The last book for this article is Force: Drawing Human Anatomy by Mike Mattesi
This is a book is more about the motion of the human body and how to draw it convincingly as opposed to just learning straight up anatomy. Mattesi stresses the function of each body part and how gravity effects the appearance of the muscle forms relative to the pose the body is in. This is super helpful information for comic book artists, as comics are all about movement and action. If you want to work in comics, you are going to need to know how to draw the body in action convincingly. To that end, this book allows you to concentrate on mastering one body part at a time using the color coded illustrations as a reference guide.
If you like Force: Drawing Human Anatomy, Mattesi has another book called Force: Dynamic Life Drawing which demonstrates the Force line and how to apply the technique to draw dynamic figures. The 10th Anniversary addition has a companion app that launches over 30 videos of Mike as he demonstrates the concepts in his book. So if video is you thing the 10th Anniversary addition is the way to go, if not you can get the standard addition. Either way you won’t be disappointed.
So that is going to wrap up part 2 of my anatomy books article. I really hope these books help you in your artistic journey. I only wish someone would have compiled a list of books like this back when I was a younger man looking for this information. My goal now is to make things easier for the next generation of artist looking to find their way. Good luck to you all!
