Expressive Figure Drawing by Bill Buchman

A new book about life drawing can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com and goes on sale on December 14th. Expressive Figure Drawing by Bill Buchman shows how drawing the figure is something that is both fun to do and a great way to express yourself. The book is illustrated with his own drawings, notable for their fluid line and expressive qualities.

Acrylic and water soluble crayon

Bill Buchman sent me a review copy of his book, published by Watson-Guptill Publications, which builds on the ideas he developed in his DVD - The Art of Drawing The Figure: Essential Exercises [Interactive DVD].

The book is inspirational for anyone interested in life drawing. He demonstrates through examples the various techniques of figure drawing starting with large geometric shapes, shapes as mass, shadows and highlights and contour lines. He also discusses negative space, and seeing the figure as a series of directional planes and explains and demonstrates all of the techniques in a way that encourages you to get out your drawing materials and get started.

The pose, the significant contours, a quick freehand sketch of the contour lines.

Black pastel chalk

There is an entire chapter on materials from charcoal, chalk, oil pastels and graphite to ink watercolors, gouache and hybrid media which are pencils or pastels that are water soluble.

Drawing structural shapes

With lots of colorful pictures he demonstrates the varieties of figure drawing, gesture drawing, drawing the mass, drawing a contour line, drawing  lind, drawing a continuous contour line, drawing a structural system, drawing shapes, drawing volumes, cylindrical forms, shadows and mass, highlights and shadows, and drawing with color.

The book is a contemporary lesson similar to Kimon Nicolaides' The Natural Way to Draw.


Mr. Buchman is an artist and educator who studied life drawing with Fletcher Martin and Victor D'Amico. In the 1980s he worked in Paris and has exhibited his work since then in Denmark, Sweden, England and the United States. He is represented internationally by Gallerihuset of Copenhagen.

The inspiration of the book is summed up in this quote "Your drawing shows what you are interested in and the egree of your interest. Be moved by forms and lines of the figure. Let them resonate in your feelings. Take in their moods. Lern to sense and capture the emotional implications and meanings contained in them. When you take pleasure in the figure's lines and forms and emotions, this pleasure will come out of your fingertips as you draw."

You can pre-order it at Amazon.com. Expressive Figure Drawing: New Materials, Concepts, and Techniques.

On remembering Victor D'Amico.(ART TEACHERS I HAVE KNOWN)(In memoriam): An article from: Arts and Activities

Creative Teaching in Art


Amazon.com $50 Gift Card (0109)

Figure Drawing by Richard G. Hatton

  

Figure Drawing by Richard G. Hatton, originally published in 1904 by Chapman and Hall is available as an e-book at Figure-Drawings.com.

From the preface:

The artist studies anatomy in order that he may the better understand what the form of the figure is. Not infrequently he finds, however,that his anatomy has not helped him very much.  He finds that it asserts itself in a manner which does not improve his work.  He feels overborne by the mass of "origins" and "insertions," and endeavors to learn by heart lists of muscles and bones, and fears the disgrace of not knowing, like a school-boy, all the facts exhibited in the book he happens to be studying.  If he grows interested he finds, after a while, that he begins to decry anatomical study as so much wasted labour.

The reason for such a verdict is that the study, instead of being directed to the correction and development of the ideas already present in the mind concerning the form of the figure, is dissipated among a multitude of accurate little statements.  The very accuracy of the statements tends to rob them of their utility to the artist.  Often a student will labour to remember the location (and even the accurate anatomical description of the location) of the insertions of a muscle, and its form.  He too, soon gets to deceive himself with the idea that a knowledge of names and of insertions amounts to the knowledge of anatomy.

Artist will always owe much to such surgeons as the late John Marshal whose works on Anatomy for Artists and a Rule of Proportion for the Human Figure have steadied and fixed the inquiry into the structure of the human body.  One would certainly not displace the sound thoroughness of MArshall for the less conclusive and less certain work of his predecessors. But there can be little doubt that the student needs something different at a certain stage of his career. He wants to be helped with his form and his construction, and to help him effectually the subject must be approached from a draughtsman's standpoint.

It is with the hope of fulfilling such a purpose that the present work is issued.

   

Printed versions at Amazon.com

Figure Drawing

Figure Drawing: A Complete Guide (Dover Books on Art Instruction)

A digital version of another book, Figure Composition by Richard G. Hatton is at Google Books.

Another contemporary book The proportions of the human body  by Sir Bertram C. A. Windle is at the Internet Archive.

The Art of Drawing The Figure - Bill Buchman

Bill Buchman will be giving a one day workshop in Pasadena on the 18th of October at the Learning and Product Expo http://www.learningproductexpo.com/pas/splash.html at the Pasadena Conference Center with a beautiful model.














Bill Buchman sent me a copy of the DVD that he made. He demonstrates a variety of techniques for drawing the figure. He shows how to approach drawings from line, forms, curves, outlines, negative space and includes the use of many media.

He does this by showing a model in a pose, then shows how he draws the model using each of the techniques. The camera looks over his shoulder as he draws and shows occasional closeups.

He has done a lot of drawing and thought about it and he brings all his experience to the DVD. He is currently working on a book.

What you will get out of looking at this DVD is not only an understanding of different approaches to figure drawing but more importantly he demonstrates that drawing the figure is great fun.

Here is the DVD at Amazon.com - The Art of Drawing The Figure: Essential Exercises [Interactive DVD]












Here is a list of the lessons:

1. Quick Stick FIgure Conte.

2. Quick Stick Figure Ink.

3.Ghostly Approach.

4.Ghostly Approach and Contours.

5. Direction.

6. Continuous Line Essense.

7. Flowing Side Stokes with Overlapping Contours.

8. Flowing Intersecting Contours.

9. Flowing Overlapping Contours.

10. Negative Space Gesture.

11. Simplified Abstract Shapes.

12. Simple Abstract Shapes, Semi-reclining Poses.

13. Elliptical Motion.

14. Fast Gesture.

15. Blind (seeing) Contour.

16. Loop De Loop.

17. All Straight Lines.

18. Pen and Wash.

19. Thin Lines, Thick Lines.

20. Thick Brush Line, Big Shapes.

21. Abstract Effect.

22. Continuous Line Gesture.

23. Fluid Overlapping Contours.

24. One Warm, One Cool Color.

25. Mass and Line.

Figure Drawing: Art Is An Attitude 3 @ Yahoo! Video

Female Proportions, Male Proportions - Natuurlyk en schilderkonstig ontwerp der menschkunde

The figure divided into ten parts.



The female figure divided into nine parts.

Natural and artistic treatise of the science of humans.

Natuurlyk en schilderkonstig ontwerp der menschkunde : leerende niet alleen de kennis van de gestalte, proportie, schoonheyd, muskelen, bewegingen, actien, passien, en welstand der menschbeelden : tot de teykenkunde, schilderkunde, beeldhouwery, bootseer en giet-oeffening toepassen : maar ook hoe sich een mensch na deselve regelen, in allerhande doeningh van gaan, staan, loopen, torssen, dragen, arbeyden, spreken en andere gebeerden : bevallig en verstandilijk aastellen zal a seventeenth century book about drawing published in 1683 has interesting engravings of male and female proportions and how to draw heads and figures.
















The full text is available at the Internet Archive. The book on the web is from the Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Here is an image at the Bildmuseet.







Classic Human Anatomy: The Artist's Guide to Form, Function, and Movement