The Artist's Guide to Animal Anatomy

by Gottfried Bammes

This superbly illustrated and easy-to-follow guide by an internationally renowned artist and teacher illuminates many biomechanical concepts important in portraying a variety of animals in a wide array of positions. Nearly 150 illustrations, 78 of them in color, offer artists and students a systematic approach to learning proportion, rules of repose and motion, and basic forms.
Following lessons on skeletal and anatomical details, the student learns to create accurate, lively portrayals of horses, cows, dogs, lions, gorillas, bears, and other engaging creatures. Directions are provided for drawing subjects in poses ranging from static to rapidly moving. An excellent guide for drawing animal forms accurately and freely, this guide will be of value to students at all levels of expertise.
The author, according to art critic Marshall Vandruff, "draws animal anatomy with authority and is one of those rare artists who can draw with technical precision as well as with wild expressiveness." Along with his other major work, The Artist's Guide to Human Anatomy, this book represents the distillation of Bammes's insights and ideas. Together, the two volumes comprise an essential addition to the working library of any artist or illustrator.

Genres: Art, Drawing

144 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1994

Reviews

[Carrie · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a good variety of information in here. My favorite pages are the ones on the bones of the legs, which are very clear and show multiple angles and give a really great sense of how they're put together. The sections on motion are pretty useful, too.

There is a lot of text in this book, and while much of it is useful, I really don't like the way it's written. It's extremely verbose in places, and everything ends up sounding far more difficult and technical than it needs to. I wouldn't recommend this for beginners.

Also, this book loses a whole star for making one of the biggest anatomy mistakes in all of wildlife art; all of the author's drawings of lions and tigers have vertical pupils. Big cats (lions, tigers, leopards, etc) have round pupils; it's physically impossible for their eyes to form into "slits" the way a domestic cat's can. We all grow up thinking that things must look a certain way (ie, that vertical pupils are one of the basic features of cats) and end up seeing things that aren't even there. Books like this are supposed to undo that kind of thinking, not perpetuate it.

[Jozef · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was recommended and given to me by a friend, at a time when I wasn't particularly keen on learning animal anatomy.. however, as I had never done it, I figured I might as well try. It's a great book, and it approaches animal anatomy in a frank, form-follows-function sort of way, explaining why different animals are built differently. Overall, the idea here is to provide some knowledge to enable further study from life - I think this is a great approach, in place of some more formulaic methods used for learning anatomy. I can only really fault it on some of the descriptions being excessive - it isn't really necessary to note that something slopes a certain way when that is visibly evident. Recommended, but it's true to the title - the book really is a guide. A good guide, but the actual mastery of animal anatomy is left up to the reader.