Tool #1: Bridgman's Complete Guide to Drawing from Life
There are a lot of books out there designed to help aspiring artists learn how to draw and established artist learn to hone their craft. I have seen many of them, but I generally lose interest before learning everything the book has to teach me. I frequently get lost in the tall grass of trying to follow the walls of text that accompany photos and scanned sketches.
Bridgman's Complete Guide to Drawing from Life was brought to my attention by a stranger one day while searching for some useful anatomy resources at Barnes and Noble. I was a little skeptical at first (as I usually am when it comes to complete strangers approaching me in public). However, after skimming through what the book had to offer, I decided it was worth the cost and took it home.
This is a really great companion book for anyone taking a life drawing class or working on their own project in which they are drawing from life photos (I used it during my daily lunchtime sketch sessions seen here). The first half of the book really breaks down the overall structure of the human form and offers great tips for how to give your figure mass and weight, even in its early gestural state. Learning about molding alone really helped improve the overall structure of my sketch work.
The book then goes on to cover each area of the anatomy in detail. Bridgman covers the skeletal structures, tendons, and muscle formations all the way from the entire back to a single finger and lays the book out in a way that is easy to follow. Beyond simply giving sketches of these anatomical pieces, the author also created many simplified drawings of the underlying structures to help the reader understand exactly how the mechanisms of the body work.
Unlike many other how to draw books, I ended up consuming this one from cover to cover, and I plan to do it again. It’s an amazing resource to help any artist better understand the complex structures of the human body and improve the anatomy in their work.
Until next time!
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