Best Books for Drawing Anatomy
Learning to draw perfectly correct anatomy is a milestone every artist needs to reach to call themselves a professional. Anatomy is not easy, and mastering it is not an easy task. Trust me! I know.
Many people will tell you that it takes hundreds of hours of live-drawing sessions. However, as a person who spent 9+ years studying academic drawing in Russia and 10+ years working as an illustrator internationally, I promise you, you don’t.
All you need is practice, time and just these three books. And you need them in a particular order.
How do I know that? I know that because, while having all these years of art education backing me up, I contribute my skills of drawing anatomy to these three books. Besides, these days, I rarely see people coming out of art schools with a strong understanding of anatomy. Live-drawings have their benefits, but I would call them utterly useless unless you have a solid understanding of human anatomy already. Live-drawing is an advanced way to learn and should be the last step of your anatomy learning journey. I would even recommend against this step entirely, since people who learn to rely on human models for their anatomy, have hard times coming up with poses and body shapes on their own and end up needing a model for every work they do. We don’t want this handicap, now do we?
So we are going to get our knowledge from these three books. And the last thing I want to say before getting right to them is that it is not about the books themselves but about the stages of learning they represent. If you find books similar to these in their concept, go ahead and use them instead.
1. Book One.
“DRAWING CUTTING EDGE COMICS” by CHRISTOPHER HART
At this stage, you want to understand the rough idea of what muscle groups make up our bodies. We do not need perfect knowledge of anatomy just yet. What we need is to get an idea.
This book is a fantastic entry-level anatomy master class. It will get you familiar with the basic muscle groups that make the human body look the way it is. It will make you understand the most predominant shapes that form arms, legs, abdominal area and so on.
Christopher Hart has a very commercial western comic style that is fantastic for our purposes here. His style emphasizes anatomy, making it clear how muscles form and connect.
In addition to that, his style is very sexy. And by “sexy” I don’t mean “attractive,” I mean that his style emphasizes the sex of a character. If he is drawing male characters, you can see what makes them masculine, thick neck, broad shoulders, bulkier hands and so on. If he is drawing female characters, you see rounder thighs, breasts and more lean muscles. Those are important details we want to learn in the beginning.
2. Book Two.
“DRAWING HUMAN ANATOMY” by GIOVANNI CIVARDI
At this stage, you are ready to learn more complex and advanced anatomy. However, we want to see it broken down by another artist. We want to see how another artist solved the problem of drawing the human body to understand what makes a drawing work.
Giovanni Civardi’s book is fantastic because of the way it is designed. The book will lead you through the human body, dedicating two pages per body part: neck, or shoulders, or knees. For each body part, the book gives you a couple of drawings, showing the muscles in question in relationships to the skeleton, and a bunch of Giovanni’s drawings, depicting those muscles from various angles.
I think it is a terrific way to set up a book. You will understand both which muscles Giovanni is drawing and how exactly he is tackling the drawing of them. It is also beneficial to see how an artist with this very classic and neutral style of drawing handling all these different poses. Observing how he utilizes shading and lines to capture the correct shape, you can learn to do it in your style.
Now I going to cheat a bit and recommend you couple more books by the same author:
- “Drawing the Female Nude (Art of Drawing)” by Giovanni Civardi
- “Drawing the Male Nude (Art of Drawing)” by Giovanni Civardi
Both books are excellent because they give you a gallery of people drawn in all poses imaginable. For “Drawing the Female Nude” Giovanni uses two different female models with two different body types. I love this aspect of the book because it helps to break down how anatomy can manifest in different bodies.
3. Book Three
“ANATOMY FOR THE ARTIST” by SARAH SIMBLET, photographer JOHN DAVIS
At this stage, you will have a pretty good understanding of anatomy, given that you were practicing it, as you were going through the previous books (you should have). And now we need to learn how to apply our knowledge to drawing real live humans that come in all shapes and sizes, and most of the time, not as fit to show off the muscles perfectly.
“Anatomy for the artist” combines beautiful photography of human bodies with drawings drawn on the transparent pages layered on top of them. This book will help you learn to find familiar muscles and bones in every human body and will help you realize how different human bodies could be while having equally correct anatomy.
This book is pretty advanced, and I would put it just a tiny step before live-drawing. So jumping into this book straight away would be useless. However, after drawing your way through it, your skills at anatomy should be at a respectable level. You should be capable of solving any anatomical problem thrown on your way.
I hope this article was helpful, and I hope it could propel you further on your learning journey.
Happy drawing!
