Patrick’s Free Art Course – Lesson 04 Anatomy – Introduction

Human anatomy and figurative art is a wonderful and complex subject. So for a subject this complex you will need more than a quick over view. Or a few online tutorials. It will take dedicated study and practice to get it right. With that in mind I will like the other lessons list free and not so free books and DVD’s etc. Then after this reading home work will do some lessons bringing everything we have learned together.

Free Anatomy Books and other resources:

Andrew Loomis has several good books related to this subject. I have already listed them here. Link

Norman Rockwell and others also have some good information on anatomy in their The Famous Artists Course. I have already listed download for it here. Link

Constructive anatomy George Bridgman and also at Google Books Link and also at Scribd link .

The Human Machine The Anatomical Structure & Mechanism Of The Human Body by George Bridgman

Anatomy for artists  By John Marshall

A manual of artistic anatomy  By Robert Knox

Duval’s artistic anatomy : completely revised with additional original

Human anatomy for art students  By Sir Alfred Downing Fripp, Ralph Thompson, Harry Dixon

A handbook of anatomy for art students  By Arthur Thomson

Figure construction  By Alon Bement

UPDATED – Not so free resources:

Glenn Vilppu Studio – Mr Vilppu has a wonderful series of DVDs and books that are very well regarded among artists and animators. You can get them directly from his site. http://www.vilppustudio.com/ and if you are on more of a budget you can also rent them at SmartFlix.

Robert Beverly Hale also was a great teacher. You can by videos of his lectures but they are very very high. So you might be better of checking with your local libraries and schools to find a set. But if you have lots of extra money you can buy them here.  He also has some very good books you can find here.

And of course there are a huge number of books on anatomy for the artist. I will try and recommend some when I get a chance. But for me I think Villpu is the best place to start. If you want to look over all the books here is a link to Amazon.

I recently found Robert D Acland anatomy DVD series. You an find the entire set on Amazon.

A student recently told me about a very nice place to buy casts at affordable prices so I thought I would add it. Drawing from casts really helps you to get used to drawing the human form before moving on to living models. Casts

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Patrick’s Free Art Course – Supplementals 2

For Supplement number two I have decided to add The Famous Artists Course. Here is what Wikipedia says about the course. ” The idea was conceived by Albert Dorne as a result of a conversation with Norman Rockwell. For the founding faculty, Dorne recruited Rockwell, Stevan Dohanos, Robert Fawcett, Ben Stahl, Harold von Schmidt, Al Parker, Austin Briggs, Jon Whitcomb, Peter Helck, Fred Ludekens and John Atherton. All were making more than US$50,000 a year at the time, roughly equivalent to US$425,000 in 2006.[1] Later faculty included cartoonists Al Capp, Milt Caniff and Rube Goldberg. Advisory faculty for the school later included Stuart Davis, Ben Shahn, Fletcher Martin, Ernest Fiene, Arnold Blanch and Doris Lee.”

This course is a nice no nonsense approach to creating art. Its full of practical lessons learned by these great artists / illustrators over their long careers. And even if the art is a little dated that does not change how useful the ideas are. I would highly recommend that you read over and practice this entire course.

Download Links… (Note there are different versions of this course depending on the years. Not all links are the same course.)

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

You can also buy copies on Ebay and Amazon. Just make sure to get the early version that includes the original illustrators.

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Patrick’s Free Art Course – Supplementals 1

I have decided to also add supplemental elements to the art course to help flesh it out. The first supplement will the the addition of the Andrew Loomis art books. Loomis was an American illustrator but really he is best known from his art books. And his books will be nice asset to you as you try and learn art. I have added them as a supplement because they cover a wide range of subjects and are really an art course in them selves. Below I will give you several links to down load them from.

Andrew Loomis – Creative.Illustration
Andrew Loomis – Drawing the Head and Hands
Andrew Loomis – Eye Of The Painter
Andrew Loomis – Figure Drawing for all it’s Worth
Andrew Loomis – Fun WIth a Pencil
Andrew Loomis – Successful Drawing

Download Links to collections of his books:

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Link 4 – HTML

Link 5

Link 6

And here is a short biography of Loomis.  Link

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