April 2007
Persuade somebody out of their clothes, and have a go at drawing a nude! No budding artist who wants to paint people can hope to do a good job until they know what lies beneath clothing and can draw it. Getting the proportions right, making flesh look rounded in the right places and drawing those tricky bits like fingers, toes and hair are complicated, so who better than Search Press' own Italian artist to show you how it is done?
This is about drawing and so all the sketches are in pencil. Learn about proportion and how it works, reduce the human body to a set of shapes and think about what lies under the skin. Different poses, how limbs etc look when doing a variety of things and how perspective works. Get to grips with light and shade, foreshortening and more; in fact, pretty much everything I can think of in an admirably short book filled with helpful studies. It certainly got me thinking about the body and how to put it onto paper, and even if you cannot immediately get hold of a real model you can learn a lot by copying the studies here. Of particular use is the first section of the book, which explains about proportion and structure as without this nothing can come after. A very handy no-nonsense primer.
* Myshelf.com *
May 07
There's a lot to be said for a book on figure drawing that finishes after 64 pages. This is, of course, a huge subject and some equally huge and all-encompassing books have been written about it which are both exhaustive and exhausting.
In a series of wonderfully sensitive pencil drawings, Giovanni looks at the practice of figure drawing, explaining the main form, proportion, basic anatomy, muscle structure, perspective and pose. The limited extent of the book means that everything has to be done succinctly and you don't get page after page of almost identical analyses of muscles or barely-changed poses.
The converse of this is, of course, that the book can only really scratch the surface but, if you want a well thought-out introduction to a huge subject that can be a lifetime's study in itself, there really is no better place to start.
* Artbookreview.net *
