What is missing in Anatomy books

[davi]

I'm trying to figure out what people feel that anatomy books aren't helping them with.

I know one thing i feel anatomy books need to cover are;

The variation of the face: I've seen many books cover how to draw a single type of face but never get into detail of how and why faces are different.

Body fat: To be honest 90% of the drawings people are doing of figures are super fit and strong, but when someone tries to attempt doing non-fit figures they run into the problem of not having enough reference/experience.

Male vs Female: I've seen alot of books which will just show a ton of male body parts and then like a few images of a female chest. There are so many other differences that aren't being touched on in these books.


are there any else that you guys feel need to be touched upon?

[mtw]

Originally posted by davi
Body fat: To be honest 90% of the drawings people are doing of figures are super fit and strong, but when someone tries to attempt doing non-fit figures they run into the problem of not having enough reference/experience.

That's a good idea. Anatomy for the Artist by Sarah Simblet has one diagram of areas where women develop fat, but it could use lots more information.

I'd also like to see differences in ethnicities.

[Prometheus|ANJ]

I was thinking about this last 'night' (I sleep during daylight, nowdays... uh nights).

I got an anatomy book in the hope that I would find that perfect image to use as reference for my pinup. There is no such image. The perfect image is the mental image you have in your head once you know anatomy.

Buying an anatomy doesn't magically improve your anatomy drawing skills. The best way to improve is to make tons of studies from life or photos. After a while you can start looking in the anatomy book and only then you can begin to understand which knob is what and hopefully learn to guess muscles better when you make original characters.
Then it's only a matter of making more studies and remember to check the anatomy book when you get insecure what is what.
You can probably learn decent anatomy from just making studies. I very much doubt you can learn it from just an anatomy book with dissected muscles and skeletons. Some anatomy books have examples of poses, but not enough material to cover enough studies. An anatomy book is only useful (and it is very useful, don't get me wrong) if you use it in combination with studies.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's a bad idea for a 'noob' to draw some sort of wonky barbarian and then use an anatomy book in an attempt to correct and add realistical muscles. I've tried that approach and it doesn't work. Even though the muscles can look quite correct the pose will most likely be stiff, the belly will have the 'superdefined 6-pack syndrome' we see in so many noob drawings. Aslo, it's likely that the wrong muscles will be tense or relaxed. The importance of adding fat to the right places such as the belly and inner thighs can also be difficult to understand if you are obsessed by just the muscle definition.

[gekitsu]

body fat is certainly an issue. i read quite a lot of art books and in ONE of them, there was ONE diagram where areas of subcutane fat were marked yellow.

also, having several approaches in simplification could be a useful thing. showing the body and face in masses.
manipulating a set of masses also is a good means of drawing something else than your generic superhero. making the chin mass larger and protruding, lowering the forehead a bit, changing the angle of the sides of the head etcetera

a good text on how and why fat sits on the body (normal fat, as the little fat behind your eyes or the shape-rounding subcutane fat of women, as well as excess fat, how and where it settles, what it does to other parts of the body...) could make the concept of fat more popular as well.

prom is right, too. studying anatomy involves both depicting and learning. combination of both will also lead to you recognizing the shapes of a body as the results of the underlying structure.

and, finally, a good word about how important it is to know when to fuck all the rules and things that are in anatomy books in the ass.

[winjer]

It took me a while to figure out what prometheus said. I used to just draw crap out of bridgman and try to overlay it onto figures. No work good. Once I started just leaving the book open and comparing what I saw on the model with what was in the book it became obvious that muscles arent super defined like they are in anatomy books. Just realizing that has helped me understand what I see a little more. Another important thing is landmarks. Just knowing a few landmarks can tighten up your anatomy. I dont think many books stress that. Loomis has a good chart, but i havent seen many others.

davi - get hogarths head drawing book
he goes into how faces of different ages/ethnicities work. Very helpul.

[Nimrod]

I would love to find some information/techniques on facial variations. davi, I remeber you posted a link quite some time ago that might have been along those lines... I think it might have been why certain facial variations are considered attractive though. Not too helpful.

I have a Burne Hogarth book, Drawing the Human Head, which has a small section on ethnic facial characteristics, which is about the closest I've ever seen. It's not very detailed however. Again, I think Prom is right; you just have to find refs of normal people of all different kinds and practice drawing them, and eventually you will train yourself to know what you can vary and how much to acheive a certain look.

[davi]

I have the hogarth' heads and faces book. It covers only a certain type of face. I'd like alot of information on what makes a face face different than a males, nationality differences and extra.


prom, i know completely about what you are saying, but learning anatomy isn't just a click of the fingers for everyone. Alot of people need books to look at. I think there are different mindsets on learning anatomy. Some peopole learn from the shapes of the external body, others need to know the hows and whys of body parts. Without bridgman I don't think i would have ever improved with my anatomy. Life drawing only took me so far, and i got confused often.

[jwo]

thats why i want a morgue or funeral home job, or a friend with keys to said places.

[sic1]

Originally posted by davi
I'd like alot of information on what makes a face face different than a males, nationality differences and extra.

I completely agree. I plan on doing studies (unless theres a better way) on different faces and such in order to see differences.

I am more technical when it comes to anatomy and such, so it helps me to know what each muscle does. Anatomy for the Artist does this pretty well, but it could be expanded upon.

Unfortunately, I only own one book on anatomy right now. I don't know how other books handle (with diagrams and such). Several different angles with muscles relaxed and contracted help me to visually understand what is going on.

Luckily some other non-anatomy books touch on that, so they can give me a general idea.

It seems to me, it's best to absorb a lot of information, but shape it to suit your needs and your style.

[wes9000]

honestly, i think alot of the anatomy books will really only help you out with seeing proportions etc and can only take you so far. they tend to be more about doing a certain style of anatomy. which is all some people want.
but
if you really want to know anatomy and be able to rely on your knowledge when youre not working from life, i personally think that you just have to buckle down and learn the muscles. all of them. learn their names. learn their origins and insertions. learn how they are layered and what happens if something is pronated or supinated or rotated. etc.
this is something i really started working on last winter and it has helped immensely.
when you know the inner workings of the figure and why things are a certain way you can go anywhere from there.
theres a book called Artistic Anatomy. the authors name is Richer i believe? this is the best anatomy book i have.

[MrSmith]

i'm sort of re-learning how to draw right now, so take what i say with a grain of salt.

i have so many anatomy/figure books my bookshelf can barely support the weight, but i have gotten at least some uselful info out of every one of them.

the book i have by Jack Hamm is probably my favorite book on anatomy/figure drawing. the thing i like the most that seems to be lacking in other books is its description of how and where bones affect the surface. most anatomy books barely if at all touch on the BIG problem areas like elbows, knees and other boney areas, but this book has pages devoted to it. i see tons of people who seem to think that only muscles 'show'. elbows and knees on many pics look like they are made up of many tiny muscles, but they should be drawn as bone.

Anatomy for the Artist by sarah simblet is great. it uses mostly photos rather than drawings which is a good way to show the big differences from body to body. it also uses drawings on semi-transparant overlays over photos that really help.

i've heard many people complain about hogarth's books. i have a few, and it seems that he is trying to teach his own style of drawing instead of just showing general anatomy.

[Joeslucher]

The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Science Fiction Techniques isn't a great book but it has a section on faces where it lays out the different places where fat tends to be on the face that I think is really informative and should be better explained in real anatomy books.

[davi]

i think hogarth teachs the forms more than other books. I really didn't think i liked hogarth until a few days ago when i was doing some feet studies. His over exagerations make it easy for the eye to know placement, but his anatomy books do not show why parts look and shape the way they do.

[gekitsu]

android recommended an anatomy book some time ago. it was called photo atlas of anatomy or something like that. i'm not at home right now and can't look it up.

that book was extremely useful for deeper understanding as it featured photos of the real thing (well, almost... the people depicted arent living anymore :)) instead of selective or beautified drawings.

it was freakin expensive, though :(

[Vhy]

I would say that if you have 60$ get Human Anatomy by Elliot Goldfinger. That one devotes 2 or 3 pages to each individual muscle. Unlike the other books I have it shows a lot of cross-sectional views, and you really need to understand the cross sections of the body in order to place planes of shadow or to draw foreshortened views. There's a useful section on body fat, though it probably could have been expanded.

The book android recommended was Color Atlas of Human Anatomy. It's basically a bunch of detailed photographs. If you know the muslce names you can just look at the bone photographs to see where they attach.

Gairy Faigin's book on facial expression has a lot of discussion of how faces vary in relaxed state. This is another book that is really helpful regardless of what style you're after.

Bridgman is more about how to simplify the forms. I look at it pretty often.