Basic Human Anatomy: An Essential Visual Guide for Artists

This book was recommended by a professional comic artist when someone asked for good anatomy references.This book is utterly wonderful. It starts with the basics (stereometric human forms) and gives several ways to conceptualize the form, from broad shapes and planes to relational measurements. It then gets more complex, and goes over bones, then muscles, then breaks into individual body sections.Each section has multiple exercises, and the center of the book is a series of beautifully rendered anatomy drawings. They're exceptionally well done, impressing both the art teacher I showed the book to and my doctor friend, who was very pleased at how the radius is shown repeated in "twist," which is how it sits most often. The poses often look more natural than you'd see in a basic anatomy chart.It's worth every penny, even for a hobbiest like myself. It really helps me when I'm looking at a reference but want to change something, making the body larger or smaller, changing an angle, etc. It also helps me conceptualize why a body part might not look right in a sketch. Absolutely adore this book.

I'm a studio art major and this is the first anatomy book I've ever bought. I'm in my third year and the closest we got to learning anatomy in classes was a few days of drawing a skeleton. This book is AMAZING and I really feel like my figure drawings and paintings will benefit from understanding the underlying structures better. I looked at many different book options and this seemed to have the best reviews for being overall comprehensive.There are so many beautiful and informative drawings and examples of different mediums. It says that some of them were amassed from Osti's own sketchbooks over the years and I thoroughly believe it. It seems like it must have taken years to generate them all at such a high level of quality. There are full people, skeletons, and muscles posed in many interesting ways that you can copy or take inspiration from. I think the exercises would be particularly great for digital art-- which I recently did for the first time-- given that you can practice layering with ease. The sections on the head/ skull seem very helpful for portraiture, but I don't think I'll much use the hands/ feet section, since I feel confident in my education in that realm.Also, I appreciate the exercises a lot as I've been taught the basics of the stereometric method (boxy people, identifying simple plane changes). After the stereometric method, it covers all the bones in the body from many different angles for XX and XY skeletons, the muscles shown in different layers and together, and also has a separate section of color-coded muscles to help differentiate. It individually shows angles of the pelvis, the spine, etc. There are incredibly detailed labeled diagrams giving the names of all the bones and muscles, and explanations of their "origins and insertion." A few pages seem like a little much for my purposes, since I'm not sure that I want to learn the names and functions of every single bone and muscle in the human body, as I'm not an anatomy student, but I'm glad I have the option!The book has some helpful tips for quickly working out proportions and drawing in general, and I'm sure much more than I've mentioned since I haven't read it all, just skimmed its 300 pages! I really recommend this book. It also isn't too pricy compared to others. I wasn't asked to review or anything, I'm just IN LOVE with the book lol. It's also really great during social distancing since the only models I have access to are my immediate family. There's a section on lighting that's useful for details if you don't have a real person or a photograph in the right pose. I hope I helped you decide if this is what you're looking for!

Starting by stating the obvious, you can't have only a single anatomy for artists book. However, this one is great for beginners and intermediate levels. With all the great anatomy books out there, either classical or contemporary, if I were to be asked to choose only a single anatomy book to keep, this would be it. Hands down! This is one of the most valuable drawing books among my collection. Roberto Osti takes on a very complicated topic in figure drawing, which is anatomy, a topic that is so important, yet dreaded by novice and experienced artists alike, and explains it in a very clear and artistic way, which makes it an enjoyable read. The size of the book (8.5x10.5 inches), the clarity and quality of the diagrams, the logical progression of adding in complexity and details, makes this a great study companion and reference. You are really in good hands with an elegant artist who started by being a professional medical illustrator. He clearly understands what is sufficient for artists to know for a successful figurative drawing. Finally, the last chapter of this book, Osti dedicates it to sharing important drawing techniques on light and form, tonal drawing and foreshortening, among other important aspects of figure drawing. This is one among the most valuable drawing books in my library, period. Finally, if there's one important improvement for this book it would be to enhance the Index. It is quite laking, you can't even search for a term such as "Deltoid" using the index!