In Which I Give You A Tour of My Bookshelves!

For my birthday this year, I cleaned my bookshelves!  This is a Big Deal!

Seriously, I follow a lot of blogs by other illustrators and the one thing we all seem to have in common is breaking out in chronic literature, as in the above wonderful Arnold Lobel poster.  Now that my books are as organized as they are probably ever going to get (which means that they are actually in bookshelves; I really did have piles of books all over the place), it seems like a good time to give you, dear readers, a tour.  This is going to take a couple of posts and table-breaking photos.



Going from left to right (this shelf refused to photograph well thanks to the light seeping in from the adjacent window):

Jim Henson: The Works, Christopher Finch - This is one of the first art books I owned and it has spoiled me rotten ever since.  Loaded with concept art and history, this is a must-have.

Sesame Street Unpaved, David Borgenicht - Nice companion to The Works and very similar in format.  Plus you can currently find it for dirt cheap on Amazon.

Chuck Amuck and Chuck Reducks, Chuck Jones - Even if I wasn't such a Chuck Jones maniac, I'd consider these books essential. They're packed with concept art, anecdotes, and drawing tips.

Imaginative Realism and Color and Light, James Gurney - These books together have a wealth of information for painters. I don't paint very often, so I appreciate them more as a collection of Gurney's artwork.

Various Anatomy for Artists Books - Hey, remember these guys from the very earliest days of this blog? Wow, that takes me back.  Specifically, I've kept Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Anatomy, Ken Hultgren's The Art of Animal Drawing, Fritz Schider's Atlas of Anatomy for Artists, and a little later we'll be seeing Eadweard Muybridge's essential Animals in Motion, Ellenberger and Davis' Atlas Of Animal Anatomy For Artists, Eliot Goldfinger's Animal Anatomy For Artists: the Elements of Form (it was on sale), and Katrina Van Grouw's The Unfeathered Bird.

Character Animation Crash Course, Eric Goldberg - I've been referencing it more than I thought I would when I first reviewed it.

Paleoart Galore! - OK, let's see here. We've got The Macmillan Illustrated Encyclopedia of DINOSAURS and Prehistoric Animals, at least until an updated reference of every known prehistoric animal comes along, Mark Witton's beautiful Pterosaurs, Henry Gee and Louis V. Rey's beautiful beautiful Field Guide to Dinosaurs: The Essential Handbook for Travelers in the Mesozoic, Gregory S. Paul's Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs, William Stout's awesome The (New) Dinosaurs, the two Dinosaurs: Past and Present exhibit catalog books (I haven't read them but my succinct review of this wealth of classic paleoart is awesome), and Dinosaur Art: The World's Greatest Paleoart. And there's more on other shelves...

The Art of Maurice Sendak, Selma Lanes - I haven't been able to properly read this yet but it's an excellent collection of Sendak's art and since you can find copies for under ten dollars, it is a must-have.

Adventure Time: The Art of Ooo, Chris McDonnell - Here's the first series-specific art book I've found that's as good as the two aforementioned Jim Henson art books. It's a must-have for fans of "Adventure Time" and is packed to the gills with concept art, interviews, and trivia.

Next, more animation, comics, and children's books.

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Sketch of the Day!  The first "Final Fantasy" is a little strange, it turns out.

Reasons why you need Katrina Van Grouw's _The Unfeathered Bird_

It Fills a Massive, Obvious Gap in Your Animal Anatomy Library - Remember way, way back in 2009 when I reviewed Eliot Goldfinger's massive tome Animal Anatomy for Artists?  And how I was so stunned and disappointed that, for all the gorgeous and rigorously accurate studies of a wide variety of mammals, he only illustrated the internal structure of one bird?  And it was a domestic chicken?  If you were just as put off by that, The Unfeathered Bird is for you.

It Makes That One Chicken Look Embarrassing - Really embarrassing.  Van Grouw has rendered staggeringly beautiful studies of at least one species of every major clade of extant theropod you can imagine and a not-insignificant number of clades you can't, plus a couple of extinct species.  She even goes so far as to illustrate the often insane extremes of domestic ducks, chickens, and pigeons.

It's a Comparative Anatomy Book in the Truest Sense - Van Grouw has grouped different unrelated clades of birds via a long-antiquated system that rather arbitrarily bunched similar-looking birds (ie, all long-legged, long-necked birds) together regardless of actual relationships.  The arrangement of the book, I will admit, confused me at first, but it facilitates comparison between species adapted to similar lifestyles.  She does clarify, as much as she can, who is actually related to who in the body text. 

Man, You Think You Know Birds... - There are some crazy reveals in this book.  Whooping Cranes have a windpipe that loops around inside the keel of their breastbone, creating essentially a live French horn.  Screamers posses vicious, claw-like spikes on their wrists.  Toucan nostrils face backwards.  Swifts have xygodactyl feet, quite contrary to every other illustration.  And, of course, necks lie.

It's Just Gorgeous - Seriously.  I can't imagine the work involved in preparing a book of this scope.  The fact that it's a fabulous work of art is icing on the cake.


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Sketch of the Day! Had some visitors earlier this month.

More AA4A books?

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.

More AA4A books? Well, why not? Especially when you can get Knight and Hultgren for about $20.00 together at Amazon.
I suspected earlier that if anyone was going to cover non-mammals in an AA4A book, paleoart legend Charles R. Knight was the one to do it. I was right. Sort of.

He has a chapter on birds, which is very nice. He has shorter chapters on other animals. There's lots of information here... but not many illustrations.

This is all you get for reptile anatomy. And it's fairly typical for the book. Instead of diagrams and illustrations, you get loads and loads of text:

It is a bit of a disappointment, although the drawings are nice. I should note something about the text, and this has hit me in the Calderon book too (which I read more of recently): The text is very dated. I don't just mean "no longer scientifically accurate" dated but also "antiquated language that may throw you off" dated. Take a shot when Knight calls some rather innocuous animal or other a "brute" and/or "dumb animal". (It took me a while but I think I finally figured out that the old phrase "dumb animal" doesn't mean "not as smart as a human" but instead means "can't talk like a human". The reader is invited to cringe along with me at the unfortunate implications.)
So what's the book that came in the same box got to bring to the table? I've never even heard of Ken Hultgren. He's probably just going to cover horses again and...

Woah...

Well, he'll probably just do another chapter on dogs, right?

Dude...

OK, if you haven't gathered by now, this book blew me away. He does not discuss the nuts and bolts of anatomy at all, really. But by the end, you don't care. The things you will learn about action and animation more than make up for it. I highly recommend it.

Comparing the AA4A Books 4: Ellenberger

Part One, Part Two, Part Three.
An Atlas Of Animal Anatomy For Artists is made up almost entirely of anatomical diagrams and hardly any text at all, save the obligatory labels to help identify what you're looking at. There isn't much here to explain how all this anatomy works - which is where the Calderon book comes in (see previous post). Therefore, I recommend using these two books to compliment each other.
This book is fundamentally concerned with anatomical diagrams. Most of these are reprints of Ellenberger's plates. The detail is eerily photorealistic and the amount of information is nearly obsessive:

See, now you know how to draw a cow tongue. I've never seen an AA4A book that bothered to give a detailed anatomical diagram of what the insides of an animals open mouth looks like. The detail studies like this are wonderful. You'll also learn how a horseshoe fits on, how an elk's tear duct looks, and what different sized dogs' skulls look like. And, most importantly, there is a life study of each animal next to their internal anatomy studies:

In addition to the Ellenberger plates, the book includes a massive appendix including Stubbs' dissection of a horse, Straus-Durckheim's cat studies, and selected dissections of a number of species from Cuvier. In other words, you're going to get a bat muscle study. As well as a monkey, seal, hare, squirrel, and small kangaroo. While not exhaustive by any means, it makes me very curious about the complete Anatomie Comparee.
Dover has a few other AA4A books available in it's catalogue and perhaps I'll collect a few more later on. I remember the Ken Hultgren book from college but never got a copy for myself and the fact that Charles Knight wrote an AA4A book intrigues me. If anyone was ever going to cover non-mammals...
Speaking of, aside from Gregory S. Paul's Predatory Dinosaurs of the World (which I keep cheerleading for and is available at Amazon for just over a dollar so what are you waiting for) I can recommend the following online resources for people who like drawing animals other than humans / dogs / horses:
Skullsite - Page with a wide variety of avian skeletons and nearly every genus represented as a skull. It makes Goldfinger's chicken look downright embarrassing.
University of Puget Sound's Bird Wing Database - Good as a reference for color and markings, particularly the underwings (which tend to be a lot less interesting than you'd think).
Digimorph - Stupid name (it sounds like a terrible action figure line). Amazing site. Gives you the ability to look at every imaginable vertebrate skull in 3-D. There are also several whole skeletons and the site remembers that invertebrates are animals too.
Gaping Maws - This one's more just for fun, but it's a surprisingly good source for photo reference.
Whew... now what can I blog about?

Comparing the AA4A Books 3: Calderon

Part One, Part Two.
I'll try to keep this one brief, at least compared to the previous review. This one won't be as image-heavy either. Simply put, this book may be my favorite of the three although I wouldn't use it alone.
The first thing you'll probably notice is that this book has loads and loads of text. This isn't a book for people expecting big giant scientifically-minded diagrams like we saw in Goldfinger. The entire first half is almost entirely text and it's also (to be fair, this is just me skimming so I may change my opinion if I read the whole thing) essentially a soapbox.
Calderon is a painter, but he argues at length that if you want to be any kind of successful visual artist, you must have good basic drawing skills. He also goes on about how using anything other than charcoal to draw with, or anything smaller than what can fit comfortably on your basic flatbed scanner to draw on, is madness. And he seems to think erasers are for sissies and that your initial sketch must be more accurate than humanly possible.
That aside, however, I agree with him on the drawing. If you want to create appealing, convincing animals -or anything- you need to learn how to draw from observation.

The second half of the book is what I paid for.
Here Calderon discusses anatomy, and he has a distinct advantage against Goldfinger for a number of reasons. He picks a small set number of animals to focus on (no points for guessing three of them). He includes lots of comparative anatomy studies, as in the illustration above. He discusses their internal and external anatomy. That makes a big difference. And he illustrates how the bones, muscles, skin, and even the organs work together in a living animal. That makes a huge difference.

And while the illustrations are small, they are beautiful. Like I said, I haven't read all of the text but I began to suspect that the subjects were all animals Claderon knew. There's a familiarity and a love on display here. It gives the book a very personal touch.
About the only immediate downside, and the reason why I wouldn't use this book as a reference on it's own, is that there are no full-body skeletons or muscle studies. That's where the Ellenberger comes in...

Comparing the AA4A Books 2: Goldfinger

Part One.

When I picked up Eliot Goldfinger's Animal Anatomy For Artists: the Elements of Form from the Library, the first thing I noticed was it's size. It is quite tall and wide, but also much thinner than I expected. When I first saw the book advertised on Amazon, I figured it'd look more like the Gregory S. Paul book above. (To me, the Paul is what a $30-$50.00 book looks like.)
I'll admit I was also initially disappointed in the content of Goldfinger as well. And then I realized two things:
1) This was written and illustrated by a person who is primarily a sculptor and,
2) it's basically a textbook on the skeletal system and musculature of various mammals that just happens to have been written from the point of view of an artist.
Neither of these are bad things to point out, obviously. However, it may change the way you'll want to think of this book. For one thing, it better prepares you for the fact that almost a full half of the book is taken up by pages and pages of of individual muscle studies like this:

Now, as I said before, your needs may be different from mine. Personally, I thought it was a bit much and I felt that it took valuable space away from more full skeletal and muscle studies.

And as you can see, those anatomical studies are gorgeous. They make up most of the book's second half. Each animal gets a side view and a few get a front/back view as well.
But Goldfinger's biggest selling point is the fact that he goes beyond the human/dog/horse trinity. Indeed, you get a very wide variety of mammals in this book. The giraffe muscle study promised on the cover is in there, as are rhinoceri, rabbits, sea lions, kangaroos, hippos, and many more. Several other species are represented by skeletal studies. Tapirs are just as unconventionally cute on the inside.
And this, sadly, leads us into the bad news. Ultimately, Goldfinger's attempt to create an anatomical reference for every kind of modern mammal you could think of off the top of your head works to his disadvantage. For example, you get a skeletal study of a bat and a dolphin, two animals who have diverged very far from the somewhere-between-human-and-dog basic mammal body plan (which, incidentally, is why humans and dogs show up in every one of this kind of book). And that's very cool, but you don't get a muscle study.
Furthermore, Goldfinger tends to have just one detailed skeleton (and sometimes muscle) study for each group of mammal. So, that dolphin? Well, she's representing all cetaceans. Sometimes, Goldfinger will have a series of silhouettes to represent the members of the group after their representative's anatomical study. And this makes sense for the horse. Less sense for the dog. And no damn sense at all for the kangaroo:

...Who is here to represent every marsupial ever. Even though her skeleton is ridiculously specialized. So yeah.
And this brings me to my biggest point of contention. This book is for people who want a reference on many different kinds of mammals. I've chosen my words carefully throughout the review. I've done this so that you will not be as disappointed as I am to learn that, according to this book, there is only one non-mammal in the entire world and this is it:

Funny I should mention Gregory S. Paul again in the beginning, eh?
This is another reason why Goldfinger's scope works to his disadvantage. Then again, he stays short of drawing an iguana, a bullfrog, and a goldfish and calling it a day. (And that's just sticking to the vertebrates...)
All told, this book is not worth it unless you really need studies of each and every muscle and skeletal studies of (not really) every mammal. For the rest of us, Ellenberger and Calderon are a much, much better choice. (Not least because they cost less than half the cost of Goldfinger's book combined.) Reviews of their books are up soon.

Comparing the Animal Anatomy for Artists Books, part 1

This is going to be long, a little overwhelming, and picture-heavy, so I'll cover it in multiple posts. I have to start with a sort of disclaimer. I am reviewing these books based upon how well (or not) they fit my needs. Your mileage may vary. Maybe you like drawing horses, dogs, and humans.
It should also be stated right now, in case you do not have any anatomy for artists books and are reading this to learn more about them before you build a library: humans, horses, and dogs are basically the holy trinity of Animal Anatomy for Artists books. Each and every AA4A book will have detailed skeleton and muscle studies of each. Occasionally you'll find a book with a section on cats, but it's very rare for these books to deviate. And you can pretty much forget about any detailed information on non-domestic animals.
Most importantly, by no means should you use these books by themselves. You should indeed build an art reference library. No one book is going to contain all the information you need. For example, AA4A books are generally very concerned with the internal structure of humans, dogs, and horses -- but they rarely get into how the animals look when moving. (And this, by the way, has always struck me as strange. How many drawings and paintings of figures just standing around have you seen?) Some of them never even show what the animals look like while alive; you only get the internal anatomy!

For motion, I recommend these three books. Hogarth's Dynamic Anatomy is a must-have, as is a book of Muybridge's famous photographs (there are better ones available, but this Dover edition is fine as just a reference). The Preston Blair book seems like an odd choice, however it will give you a huge advantage as an artist to know the basic principals of animation. Best of all, Blair includes diagrams based upon the Muybridge photographs, and he explains in a very friendly fashion the principals of motion and physics behind them.
If you're reading this blog, then you've got access to the Internet, and thus you've got access to loads and loads of reference photographs of living things. Even so, you'll want your own emergency backup collection of references. Animal encyclopedias tend not to be as expensive as you'd expect; just pick your favorite. And get in the habit of scrapbooking photographs from magazines. If you know a kid (or you *were* a kid) with a subscription to Ranger Rick or World, save those back issues!
Next post, I'll share my thoughts on Goldfinger's doorstopper, Animal Anatomy For Artists: the Elements of Form.

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This appeared at Cartoon Brew the other day, and since it fits a reoccurring theme I've had on the blog so far, I figured it was worth sharing for those who missed it:

It's an introduction to an Italian Disney special, and it appears to have been animated by Romano Scarpa, a Disney comic book artist. That explains some of the stranger characters. The Cartoon Brew comments help identify several of them. Personally, it always bugged me how some Disney birds are flight-capable and others arbitrarily aren't. Also, it amuses me to no end that they keep trying to make Donald into some kind of superhero.
(By the way, three weird Disney things so far and not a single weird Looney Tunes thing. This must be rectified...)