100 Best Figure Drawing Books of All Time
We've researched and ranked the best figure drawing books in the world, based on recommendations from world experts, sales data, and millions of reader ratings. Learn more
Drawing is an acquired skill, not a talent -- anyone can learn to draw! All you need is a pencil, a piece of paper, and the willingness to tap into your hidden artistic abilities. With Emmy award-winning, longtime PBS host Mark Kistler as your guide, you'll learn the secrets of sophisticated three-dimensional renderings, and have fun along the way -- in just twenty minutes a day for a month. Inside you'll find: more
the... more
Adam Robinson[One of five books that confirm] there is far, far more in our unconscious mind than is dreamt of in our philosophy. (Source)
Adam Robinson[One of five books that confirm] there is far, far more in our unconscious mind than is dreamt of in our philosophy. (Source)
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Animation is one of the hottest areas of filmmaking today--and the master animator who bridges the old generation and the new is Richard Williams. During his fifty years in the business, Williams has been one of the true innovators, winning three Academy Awards and serving as the link between Disney's golden age of animation by hand and the new computer animation exemplified by Toy Story.
Perhaps even more important, though, has been his dedication in... more
His hugely influential series of art instruction books have never been bettered, and Figure Drawing is the first in Titan's programme of facsimile editions, returning these classic titles to print for the first time in decades. less
Don't have time to read the top Figure Drawing books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
Author Jane Davenport is a beloved artist and international workshop instructor known by her thousands of students and fans for her over-the-top, enthusiastic, happy, and encouraging style. In Drawing and Painting Beautiful Faces, Davenport guides you, step by step, through the foundations of drawing a face, developing successful features, creating skin tones,... more
When it was originally published in 1970, How to Draw What You See zoomed to the top of Watson-Guptill's best-seller list--and it has remained there ever since. "I believe that you must be able to draw things as you see them--realistically," wrote Rudy de Reyna in his introduction.
Today, generations of artists have learned to draw what they see, to truly capture the world around them, using de Reyna's methods. How to Draw What You See shows... more
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James Gurney, New York Times best-selling author and artist of the Dinotopia series, follows Imaginative Realism with his second art-instruction book, Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter. A researched study on two of art's most fundamental themes, Color and Light bridges the gap... more
Don't have time to read the top Figure Drawing books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
Though there are many books on drawing the human figure, none teach how to draw a figure from the first few marks of the quick sketch to the last virtuosic stroke of the finished masterpiece, let alone through a convincing, easy-to-understand method.
That changes now!
In Figure Drawing for Artists: Making Every Mark Count, award-winning fine artist... more
Stan Lee, the Mighty Man from Marvel, and John Buscema, active and adventuresome artist behind the Silver Surfer, Conan the Barbarian, the Mighty Thor and Spider-Man, have collaborated on this comics compendium: an encyclopedia of information for creating your own superhero comic strips. Using artwork from Marvel comics as primary examples, Buscema graphically... more
Grab a pencil and an eraser--it's time to explore the world around you and illustrate the people in it! Featuring a simple, step-by-step format for budding artists, Figure Drawing for Kids is a great way to start sketching friends and family, pop culture icons, and epic superheroes--one easy-to-draw exercise at a time.
Along the way, you'll learn helpful terms and essential drawing concepts like proportion, negative space, point of view, composition,... more
Creative Illustration is considered Loomis's magnum opus, which was aimed primarily at the professional-level illustrator. Divided into seven... more
The 400 remarkable illustrations explain the anatomical details of male and female figures in motion and at rest, always stressing the human form in... more
This visually striking guide takes a fresh approach to drawing the human body. A combination of innovative photography and drawings, practical life-drawing lessons, and in-depth explorations of the body's surface and underlying structure are used to reveal and celebrate the human form.
Combining specially-commissioned photographs of models with historical and contemporary works of art and her own dynamic life... more
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Anime artist Yoai has captivated a huge audience with her adorable chibi drawings, and now she's ready to share her secrets with you! Chibi is Japanese slang for "short," and that's an appropriate description for these tiny doll-like creatures.
In this book, you'll find tutorials on recreating their signature features and props, including dreamy eyes, mini-skirts, vibrant hair, colorful bows, and boba cups! You'll also practice... more
Don't have time to read the top Figure Drawing books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
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Austin KleonI only came to Ed Emberley’s Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make A World last year, but it’s quickly become the #1 book I recommend to people I meet who say, “I can’t draw.” In it, Ed Emberley shows you how to “make a world” with just a few simple shapes, step-by-step. I love the emphasis on simplicity: if you can draw a triangle, a square, a circle, and a line, you’re good to go. (Source)
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For over 60 years Successful Drawing has provided a superb resource covering all the techniques needed to master three-dimensional drawing. From the fundamentals of proportion, placement, perspective, planes and pattern, through a... more
An award-winning fantasy artist and the creator of Dinotopia, James Gurney instructs and inspires in Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist. Renowned for his uncanny ability to incorporate amazing detail and imagination into stunningly realistic fantasy settings, James Gurney teaches budding artists and fans of fantasy art step-by-step the techniques that won him worldwide critical acclaim. This groundbreaking work examines the practical methods for... more
If you're not getting the kind of true-to-life results you want in your drawings (or if you can't even draw a straight line), Carrie and Rick Parks can help. As award-winning teachers, they have a proven game plan for helping artists of all levels overcome common problems and see immediate improvement in their work. As professional composite artists, they know the tricks and tools for achieving incredibly lifelike results. In this friendly, foolproof guide to drawing, they share it all:
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Don't have time to read the top Figure Drawing books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
Maughan first introduces readers to the basics of this centuries-old technique, showing how to analyze form, light, and shadow; use dark pencil, white pencil, and toned paper to create a full range of values; use the elements of design to enhance a likeness; and capture a sitter’s gestures and... more
This superb art manual is the best guide available on a subject that has fascinated artists for centuries: the human body. Jenö Barcsay, a professor who taught applied anatomy at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts, offers a detailed portrayal of the body for the fine artist in 142 full-page plates. From the entire skeleton and the joints in and out of motion to all the muscles and even facial characteristics, every body part appears... more
Revealing the drawing principles behind one hundred inspiring masterpieces, the book presents work by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rubens, Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt, and other greats. These superb portrayers of figures knew that the secret of drawing them was seeing how underlying bone and muscle structures mold the body’s surface forms. Readers are... more
Faithfully producing and methodically analyzing 100 master drawings—including works of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rodin, Goya, and Rembrandt among others—Hale shows how these artists tackled basic problems such as line, light and planes, mass,... more
Thanks to Christopher Hart’s simplified process, anyone can start creating dynamic cartoon characters right away. He has developed the easiest-ever approach to drawing the basics like heads, bodies, and those super-important cartoon expressions. Hart then helps beginners apply these fundamentals to a variety of fun types and settings such as animals, under-the-sea locales, famous stock characters, and popular backgrounds. Each lesson is laid out in accessible steps and... more
Beginning with clear, concise, immediately applicable discussions of the horizon, vanishing point, and the crucial relationship of eye level to perspective drawing, you'll learn how to place figures and objects in a drawing, depict interiors, create shade and... more
Achieve amazingly realistic and vibrant botanical illustrations, from flowers so dazzling you feel as if you might be able to smell them, to tomatoes that look as if they've just been picked from the garden. Wendy Hollender is known for her vivid, detailed, and inspiring illustrations and in The Joy of Botanical Drawing, she helps you take your art to the next level by sharing her perfected techniques through short... more
Don't have time to read the top Figure Drawing books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
With this companion volume, Rothman leads fans deeper into nature observation with her specially designed record pages for tracking daily nature sightings throughout the seasons. Her step-by-step technique tutorials for drawing a flower, a dragonfly, a robin, and much more, along with blank sketchbook pages, will inspire nature lovers and art enthusiasts of all ages to... more
The opening chapter of the book presents the special techniques involved in mastering human proportion.The chapters that follow each deal with a... more
Don't have time to read the top Figure Drawing books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
Spend less time struggling to draw proportional figures and more time designing gorgeous looks: The Fashion Sketchpad is the ultimate fashion sketchbook for the aspiring designers who love to sketch clothes but don't have the skills (or the patience!) to draw proportional figures. This fashion design book is more than just a sketchpad. It has many additional features, including:
• 420 figure templates in 20 fashion-forward poses to inspire and motivate... more
Put good vibes and motivation back into your day with this coloring book for adults. It also includes a variety of pretty patterns to make your life more relaxed and enjoyable.
You don't need any special skills. Even if you haven't drawn anything, ever, you will enjoy coloring in this booklet.
Let your inner artist out.
Guaranteed hours of pleasure, relaxation and relief from stress.
Each drawing is on a separate page, so you can share.
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For aspiring artists, drawing people can be intimidating—but it doesn’t have to be. Over years working as a fashion illustrator, Jane Davenport devised her own method of creating in-proportion figures. Her clever core technique involves using equal-size hearts to build the body’s structure. And Jane’s results have been astounding: her students go from “I can’t draw a stick figure” to producing... more
Drawing is the most essential of all visual arts. Everyone, from sculptors to painters, draws in one form or another. It is also the simplest and most affordable form of artistic expression. All you need is a pencil and paper to make something magical.
But to create a successful portrait, one must understand how to capture a person's likeness--their spirit--and portray it in graphite.
In Drawing Realistic Pencil Portraits, artist and teacher Justin Maas provides a step-by-step guide for... more
This is the easy way to learn how to draw people! Chris Hart offers straightforward instruction designed to solve common figure-drawing problems that aspiring artists encounter. His accessible, practical techniques include focusing on the body’s natural curves, as opposed to drawing muscles, and breaking the torso down into three distinct, understandable areas. With this book, anyone can immediately grasp the... more
Don't have time to read the top Figure Drawing books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
Skulls & Anatomy, Copyright Free Vintage Illustrations for Artists & Designers is a collection of 180 high quality, digitised, anatomical drawings for use in personal or commercial creative projects. This is an essential resource to take your art and design to the next level and give you a competitive advantage over your peers.
Vault Editions' team of professional designers and illustrators have spent a lifetime hunting and restoring vintage woodcuts and engravings from around the... more
To draw an anatomical figure, you don't need a stack of weighty anatomy books. Just take it step by step!
In How to Draw People, author Jeff Mellem teaches beginning artists how to draw the human figure, from stick figure to anatomically accurate person, in clear, easy-to-follow lessons. More than just a reference, this book provides the step-by-step instruction to teach you to draw the human figure and the anatomical knowledge to draw it realistically.
In each chapter, called "levels," you'll... more
Don't have time to read the top Figure Drawing books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
As both an introduction to figure-drawing concepts and a refresher for more seasoned artists, The Figure It Out Workbook is an engaging resource for anyone eager to pick up a pencil and start drawing. Combining content from Hart’s three previous Figure It Out titles, this handy, travel-sized workbook offers artists step-by-step tutorials plus blank pages for practice. It begins with the basics of drawing the head and... more
The ideal manga drawing book for beginners—eyes, hands, feet, body shapes, and more
Includes ideas for how to draw your own graphic novel
Have you spent years admiring manga drawing and wondering how to draw cool stuff, but you haven’t known how to draw it on your own? This book by Danica Davidson and illustrated by the amazing Melanie Westin will guide you to drawing your own manga. These two help you find your way and include how to draw for adult beginners in this book. They also include how to draw anime for... more
— John Romero, co-founder of id Software and CEO of Loot Drop, Inc.
"Solarski’s methodology here is to show us the artistic techniques that every artist should know, and then he transposes them to the realm of video games to show how they should be used to create a far more... more
Even if you're an absolute beginner, you can render strikingly realistic faces and self-portraits! Instructor and FBI-trained artist Carrie Stuart Parks makes it simple with foolproof step-by-step instructions that are fun and easy to follow. You'll quickly begin to:
- Master proportions and map facial features accurately
- Study shapes within a composition and draw them realistically
- Use value, light and shading to add life and depth to any portrait
- Render tricky details, including... more
In Drawing People, award-winning illustrator and instructor Barbara Bradley provides all the information you need to render clothed human figures with energy, detail and control.
Bradley begins by teaching the basics of any drawing, including proportion, perspective and value. Next, you'll learn how to overcome the special challenges posed by clothing, including fabric folds and draping effects. Bradley illustrates how they're constructed and how to draw them in different situations--on male and female... more
From comics to video games to contemporary fine art, the beautiful, wide-eyed-girl look of shoujo manga has infiltrated pop culture, and no artist's work today better exemplifies this trend than Camilla D'Errico's. In her first instructional guide, D'Errico reveals techniques for creating her emotive yet playful manga characters, with lessons on drawing basic body construction, capturing action, and creating animals, chibis, and mascots.
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Colored Pencil Painting Portraits provides straightforward solutions to the problems that artists face in creating lifelike images, and will prime readers on the intricacies of color, texture, shadow, and light as they interplay with the human form. In this truly comprehensive guide packed with step-by-step demonstrations, Nickelsen considers working from photo references versus live models; provides guidance on posing and lighting, as well as planning... more
Don't have time to read the top Figure Drawing books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
Professional art instructor Jake Spicer takes you through every aspect of drawing from life, from sketching bodies in a busy public space to drawing a model from real life or a photograph. Carefully crafted exercises break down the drawing process into easily digestible parts, while step-by-step tutorials demonstrate how you can create a full-length portrait in just 15... more
Drawing from life has been an important source of expression and satisfaction for artists through the ages. Robert Barrett, master fine artist, instructor and university professor, re-creates his studio class on the pages of this book. Inside, you'll find a complete introduction to life drawing. You'll learn not only how to accurately portray the figure, but also how to bring life and personality to your drawing subjects.
Detailed lessons, including step-by-step demonstrations, cover the fundamentals of drawing and... more
"Illustrators, sculptors, and taxidermists who draw or model animals will welcome this new revised edition." — Natural History
Here are 288 remarkably lifelike drawings of animals, furnishing artists and students with an easy-to-follow method of instruction in the drawing of horses, dogs, lions, cows and bulls, stags, and goats. So detailed and so accurate are these drawings that this book has long been a classic work of its kind.
The... more
Artist, author, and popular art instructor Peggy Dean presents this nature drawing guide that teaches you how to master drawing and watercolor techniques from sketching and shading to washes and blending. With Peggy's easy and energetic lessons, absolutely anyone--regardless of ability--can learn to draw the natural world. Beginning with delicate cherry blossoms, wildflowers, and lacy ferns, lessons build... more
The 16 texts are gathered from nearly half a century of the author’s engagement with the activity of drawing, both as a writer and as a practitioner. They are published together in one volume for the first time, accompanied by newly commissioned pieces : including a major collaborative essay by John Berger and his son, the painter Yves Berger; and an exchange of letters on drawing between John Berger and the American art historian... more
Rendering artwork that leaves viewers contemplating whether they might actually be looking at a photograph is no easy task. Introducing Realistic Portraits in Colored Pencil—a comprehensive guidebook that shows artists the secrets and steps to drawing lifelike portraits in this dynamic medium.
This engaging resource is perfect for artists who want to improve upon their existing skills and learn how to render realistic portraits utilizing a wide range of techniques. After details about the... more
The result is... more
Atelier education is centered on the belief that working in a studio, not sitting in the lecture hall, is the best place to learn about art. Every artist needs to learn basic drawing skills.
In this elegant and... more
You probably know this already, but the superpopular manga genre of Kawaii is everywhere! From Hello Kitty to Pokémon, these supercute Kawaii creatures are taking over. These characters are intensely cute, simple to draw, and colorfully graphic. The Kawaii genre puts its supercute stamp on a variety of well-known manga staples from adorable anthros to lovable monsters and animals to dark-but-still-cute Goths. Even the breathtaking and beautiful ladies of the Kawaii subgenre moe get their turn in the spotlight. The undisputed master of manga,... more
Don't have time to read the top Figure Drawing books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.