Book Review: Anatomy Drawing School: Human, Animal, Comparative Anatomy

Actually the copy I have on hand is the German edition of Anatomy Drawing School: Human, Animal, Comparative Anatomy. It's Anatomische Zeichenschule: Mensch. Tier. Vergleichende Anatomie in German. I bought it because I couldn't resist the price of Euro 9.30 (without any taxes for me). And it still is at that price as I'm writing this review. It's either a pricing error or a seriously good bargain - if you don't mind German text.

This book is by the same authors Andras Szunyoghy and György Feher, who also wrote another very similar book called Human Anatomy for Artists, which I also have. This book is thicker at 604 pages and focuses about 200 pages on human anatomy.

If you already have Human Anatomy for Artists and not interested in the drawings of animal bones and muscles, you can skip this book. Most of the illustrations inside have actually appeared in the other book. The only additional part I see is some additional drawings of drapery. The main difference is the other focuses on every single muscle with many different views, this book also has those muscles but in lesser but the basic view — front and back. Bones still have as many views and come with muscle attachment points.

Illustrations of bones and muscles are very big and clear. The animals featured are horse, dog, cat, pig, monkey, sheep, bear, deer, cow, camel and lion. A big bulk is on horses. It's really interesting to see how different the bone and muscle structures are in different animals. I don't have any other animal anatomy books to compare from but this one's pretty good.

I notice that bones in German are named completely different from English while muscles still have somewhat recognisable names. Since the animals have slightly different bones and muscle names, learning them might be a problem.

Overall, it's a pretty useful anatomy reference book. Depending on your preference, you might want to get the English book, or the less dear German edition.

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Note that this book is big, thick and slightly heavy enough for Amazon (not the Germany one) to add a bulky-item surcharge to it.

Links for Anatomy Drawing School: Human, Animal, Comparative Anatomy:
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The German edition Anatomische Zeichenschule on Amazon.de.