This selection of anatomy books is perfect for sculptors, makeup artists, monster makers, and character designers.
These books cover both human and animal anatomy, providing valuable knowledge and reference materials for anyone working in the field.
Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced artist, these books will help you improve your skills and techniques in creating realistic and accurate depictions of the human and animal form.
Anatomy for 3D Artists
– The Essential Guide for CG Professionals
By Chris Legaspi and 3dtotal Publishing
Anatomy for 3D Artists is an essential teaching guide for sculpting human anatomy. Non-software specific, it is packed with everything today’s 3D artist needs to know to tackle the difficult task of recreating the human form in 3D. Starting with 2D references, and moving on to practical and advanced 3D sculpting—including topology and animation preparation—every stage in the creation of an ideal male and female figure is covered. Great for character designers and SFX Makeup Artists. Featuring established artists such as Chris Legaspi and Mario Anger, there are also several master projects for an informative and in-depth overview of the 3D sculpting process, showing how the ideal human form can be adapted to fit any shape!
Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist
By Stephen Peck
Stephen Rogers Peck’s Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist remains unsurpassed as a manual for students. It includes sections on bones, muscles, surface anatomy, proportion, equilibrium, and locomotion. Other unique features are sections on the types of human physique, anatomy from birth to old age, an orientation on racial anatomy, and an analysis of facial expressions. The wealth of information offered by the Atlas ensures its place as a classic for the study of the human form.
Anatomy for Artists
– A visual guide to the human form
By 3dtotal publishing
Anatomy for Artists is an extensive compendium of high quality, detailed photography and drawings, showing the human figure in a variety of shapes, sizes and poses that can be used as a solid foundation for all character art.This thorough and detailed library of visual resources will consist of stunning photography and comprehensive drawings showing the muscular structure of figures of varying body types. These male and female references will act as an invaluable starting point for artists trying to create art based on the human figure. Whether you’re a traditional sculptor, oil painter or 3D digital artist, the resources within this book will prove to be useful and informative and will help you improve the quality and accuracy of your own art.
An Atlas of Anotomy for Artists
By Fritz Schider
This new and enlarged third edition contains a new section on hands, selected by Heidi Lenssen; a wide selection of illustrations from the works of Vesalius, Leonardo, Goya, Ingres, Michelangelo, and others, newly augmented with 10 plates from Cloquet’s “Anatomie de l’Homme” and 16 illustrations from Boscay’s “Anatomy”; 28 photographs of growing children from the research work of Nancy Bayley, plus 6 action studies (each consisting of about 30 photographs) from Muybridge; a bibliography compiled by Adolph Placzek; a total of more than 350 illustrations, showing the placement, function, and characteristics of every anatomical detail of importance to the artist.
For more than forty years, this book has been recognized as the most thorough reference work on art anatomy in the world. Now, it recommends itself even more strongly to the serious artist as an important study aid. Among its features are:
(1) Clear, systematic presentation, taking the student step by step from the simpler skeletal drawings at the beginning to the more complicated body-in-action sketches at the end.
(2) The juxtaposition of anatomical drawings and life photographs, making it easy to compare the inner structure of the body with its outer form.
(3) Cross-section drawings that give the artist a thorough understanding of the relation of the muscles to each other, to the bone structure, and to the internal organs of the body.
(4) Anatomical action drawings that reveal the interplay of muscles and skeleton in different positions.
(5) The comparative proportions of the male, female, child, and adolescent.
(6) A supplementary text on important features of each anatomical position, including the action of the muscles and their origin.
“I recommend Fritz Schider’s Atlas of Anatomy for Artists to those who wish to increase their understanding of the human figure.” — Robert Beverly Hale, Lecturer on Anatomy, Art Students League of New York. Adopted by Pratt Institute, Cleveland School of Art, Art Students League of New York, and others.
An Atlas of Animal Anatomy for Artists
By W. Ellenberger and H. Dittrich H. Baum
“Highly recommended as one of the very few books on the subject worthy of being used an an authoritative guide.” — Design
“Illustrators, sculptors, and taxidermists who draw or model animals will welcome this new revised edition.” — Natural History
Here are 288 remarkably lifelike drawings of animals, furnishing artists and students with an easy-to-follow method of instruction in the drawing of horses, dogs, lions, cows and bulls, stags, and goats. So detailed and so accurate are these drawings that this book has long been a classic work of its kind.
The animals are shown in three ways: external full views and dozens of details (paws, head, eyes, legs, etc.); beneath-the-skin drawings of musculature and of the positions and insertions of each muscle; and skeleton drawings of the bone structures that support and determine surface contours and configurations. In addition, special cross-sections dissect those portions of the animal — such as the head and limbs — that are most important to the artist.
For this edition, Lewis S. Born of the American Museum of Natural History collected 25 plates from George Stubbs’s Anatomy of the Horse, long unavailable; Straus-Durckheim’s Anatomie Descriptive et Comparative du Chat; and Cuvier and Laurrillard’s Anatomie Comparée. These plates, as fully annotated as the plates that make up the original book, supplement Ellenberger, Baum and Dittrich with anatomical drawings of the monkey, the bat, the flying squirrel, the rat kangaroo, the seal, and the hare. Mr. Lewis also provided a new preface and added to the annotated bibliography, which now contains 66 items.