Book Review: The Best of Bridgman: Boxed Set

October 6, 2009 by Parka

This is the boxed set containing three Bridgman anatomy books published by Dover, namely, The Book of a Hundred Hands, Heads, Features and Faces and Bridgman's Life Drawing. Let's take a look at them separately.

The Book of a Hundred Hands

There's certainly more than a hundred hands in this book — I've tried counting but lost count after a few pages. I would have called it The Book of a Tonne of Hands. The drawings of hands and fingers are plentiful and in a great variety of angles. This is a great resource book to practice from. If you want more hands, just turn the book 90 degrees, again, and again.

I like the style here, which looks more realistic — even though sketchy — than those ultra stylized ones from Burne Hogarth's Drawing Dynamic Hands. However, Hogarth's book has a clearer structure and is easier to follow.

4 out of 5 stars.

Heads, Features and Faces

This is a very thin book at 64 pages. It's an introductory guide to drawing heads. It touches basic construction of heads and the major placements and proportions of features on the face. There's a bit on using cube construction to help draw heads in different angles, but it's really simplified that nothing is mentioned on how to handle jaws.

About a third of the book is on portrait drawings, in his style, of famous people like Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, etc. He also talks about some famous artists from the past. I must say that all these are not really necessary although interesting.

If you want to construct heads out of memory, you might want to check out Burne Hogarth's Drawing the Human Head.

3 out of 5 stars.

Bridgman's Life Drawing

The main use of this book is probably to help artists visualise the weight, forms of construction and mass of the figures. Half of the book is on simplified posed figures to illustrate the point. The other half deals with the other parts of the body. There's a bit more on head and features construction here.

This book doesn't teach the anatomical parts which is dealt with in The Human Machine.

This is like volume one of introductory figure drawing and his other book Constructive Anatomy is volume two.

3.5 out of 5 stars.

Boxed set

When the three books are sold as a boxed set, it's a great bargain for the price.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

Below are previews I found on Google Books for The Book of a Hundred Hands, Heads, Features and Faces and Bridgman's Life Drawing. If you like the books, you can get them from the Amazon links I've put at the bottom — it goes to the boxed set.

Visit the link beside to read more reviews on Amazon. If you buy from the link, I get a little commission that helps me get more books for review.

Country-specific Amazon links for this book:
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.fr | Amazon.de | Amazon.co.jp

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