Product Description

This is a comprehensive manual of creative drawing covering everything you need to know to draw the human figure from memory and the imagination. It fires the imagination for drawing, beyond what can be posed in a studio or drawn from observation, to bring originality and style to your work. It explores anatomical structure, figure movement and character expression with practical demonstrations. Once the core elements have been mastered, it reveals how to draw for book illustration, cartoons and graphic novels. It extensively features the author's own back catalogue drawings and illustrations showing a wide range of styles and techniques.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38883 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 160 pages

Western Morning News, January 1992
...a book revealing the secrets of good drawing... an instructive guide to imaginative drawing...

About the Author
Ron Tiner is a self-taught artist who has worked as a freelance illustrator for over thirty years. His work has included traditional fairy tales, stories of Robin Hood and numerous books of classic literature, including the works of William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. Ron has also written extensively on art and illustration. He lives in Devon.

Customer Reviews

Fantastic. Best in it's field.
If you want to learn to draw the figure without a model, or photo-reference, this is the book for you. Covers anatomy, pose, facial expressions, the works. Includes a section on comicbook narrative, but this is no 'how to draw muscle-bound superheroes' book (although any such aspiring artist would find it very useful), but rather how to draw emotive, subtle figures from your imagination.

No worthwhile drawing techniques taught
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/RFSV77DB8JKOR I'm disappointed by this book. For a figure drawing book, it sure doesn't teach much about drawing the figure.

Yes, it touches on the essential topics like anatomical structure, proportion and movement. But it really just mentions the bare minimum, and not really in a helpful manner.

In the section of hand drawing, it explains briefly what the hand is made of and gives a tip on drawing your own hands. It ends with what I think is suppose to be the technique:

"Think of the palm as a flat square shape with a curved outer edge from which the four fingers radiate; to the basic shape is added, on one side, a fleshly and very flexible wedge shape in which the thumb is rooted."

That's all there is to drawing hands. No mention of the size of the hand, relative proportion of the fingers and other stuff. There are multiple illustrations but none really helpful -- just like looking at one's own hands.

Most important about figure drawing is about posing the figure. Simplified skeletons and blocks are used to help with posing. In the fleshing out part, muscles are drawn onto the stick figures. But it's really hard relate how the muscles are drawn especially when examples of muscles and form are few and only briefly explained.

Other sections suffer the same problem. It talks much about drawing but doesn't teach much about the actual process of drawing. Some of the tips are high on the abstraction ladder and needs to be expanded into with impossible-to-not-understand examples. The general advice is "Practice, practice, practice." Anyone can give that advice.

The book does include additional topics like expressions, perspective, composition, graphic narrative. But those topics aren't core to figure drawing.

Ultimately, this is a very general figure drawing book that I won't recommend it. I'm giving this book a 1-star rating because I find it really hard to imagine, with what's taught, that anyone will be able to comfortably pose and draw a simple figure.

It seems that there are some good reviews for this book on Amazon. I'm shocked. Maybe this book isn't a figure drawing book. In that case, I'll give it a 1-star rating for the misleading title.

(There are more pictures of the book on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)

Worth Buying!
An amazing book for anyone who wants to draw figures. This book takes you from basic poses, to putting body language into your figures, all the way up to dancers.

I have to say for myself this book gave me a lot of confidence in myself to draw from my own imagination instead of just copying exactly whats there. A brilliant buy thats worth every penny!