Book Review: The Human Figure: A Source Book for Artists and Designers

The Human Figure is a collection of figure drawings from the 18th and 19th century. There are no captions for the drawings so I'm unable to say if they are drawn by any great art masters.

Other than the section from 1769, where the humans — creepy — are without ears, the rest of the book presents some really cool illustrations. They are mainly simple line art, schematic drawings, pencil sketches and some really detailed cross hatch figure drawings, just like the one on the cover.

The earlier drawings from the 17th century are not really 100% anatomically accurate, as compared to other anatomy books. Towards the end under the 18th century section, there are some really well drawn examples of muscles and bones.

As a bonus, this book contains a CD of all the drawings shown in the book.

The knowledge imparted by the anatomy drawings can also be found in other reference books, such as Human Anatomy for Artists by Andras Szunyoghy and Gyorgy Feher. So the reason for buying this book is probably for the figure poses.

4 out of 5 stars.

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