Constructive Anatomy - Review

June 9, 2008 in Books | No comments

Constructive Anatomy by George B Bridgeman is an unabridged republication of works by the author in 1920. In spite of its age, the book is often referred to among the artists along with books by Loomis.

One thing that stuck out in this book is its language. Being such a old book, it does have archaic language. Compared to modern books (like those by Christopher Hart), it has that academic tone to it, which might be how they wrote literature in those days.

But that shouldn’t be much of a problem because this book is filled with hundreds of sketches and drawings by Bridgeman. It actually shows each and every part of the human body at various different positions and state of flex. It gives you a feel of how you can actually chisel out the shape of a body - construct the anatomy - from shapes.

I had bought this book on recommendation of some cartoonist friends here in Denver quite some time back. It was lying somewhere until I started working on Slice for the Demon Trio project. That character had pretty pronounced muscle groups and I could not skim on knowing how to draw the different anatomical parts. The book really helped me a lot in painting that work.

Should I buy this book?

Yes. Do buy this book - at around $8-$9, this is quite a bargain at the amount of things you can learn from the book. It wouldn’t be a step by step tutorial kind of book, but it definitely would be a reference book that you need to keep near you, so that you can go to it every now and then to verify that things you have drawn ‘from mind’ are correct.

Disclosure: The above link to book at the Amazon store is an affliate link with my referral code.