Complete Guide To Life Drawing
Goffried Bammes

Search Press
August 2011 / 9781844486908
Non-Fiction/Art
Amazon US || UK

Reviewed by Rachel A Hyde

Learn to draw the human figure from scratch without having to persuade anybody to take off their clothes! Of course there is no substitute for a real teacher and real flesh-and-blood models but if these are lacking, a book like this is surely the next best thing…

This is a large book with over three hundred pages and it covers a lot of ground. You can learn to draw people of every age in here, starting with learning about the basic proportions and progressing through motion studies, individual body parts, and keeping a sketchbook. The tasks to complete are many, and they start off very simply, indeed, with basic exercises, many of which are quick to complete but which build up an impressive body of knowledge.

Get to grips with proportions using strips of paper, learn about the relationship between one limb and another, practise brush strokes, go out and observe people and many more. The book is profusely illustrated not only with work by this artist but with many sketches from old masters and other, more recent, artists from the Renaissance to the present day. There are drawings showing muscles, bones and other anatomical details and naming them, so the student gets a good look at the underpinnings of the human body and how it moves. After trying out a few exercises I was impressed at how much I was learning, so if you want to master drawing and painting the human body then this is a good book to get.