The Artist's Guide to Animal Anatomy: An Illustrated Reference to Drawing Animals

Rating:
Summary: Idiosyncratic, not a book to get as a stand-alone reference
Review: Bammes was a professor of Anatomical Drawing in the Academy For Fine Arts in Dresden and his mastery of drawing and structure is obvious from many of the reproductions. He shows us a very mechanistic approach to understanding the structure of a given animal which is in stark contrast to the loose, expressive and often beautiful sketches and finished drawings.

The book is surprisingly text-heavy for a topic of this nature, especially for a book only 140-odd pages long, often explaining in words what I feel would have been better expressed with more drawings and diagrams.

It's subdivided into 9 chapters, not all of which necessarily make sense in terms of their separation. The first, "Basic Principles In Drawing Animals", is only six pages long, and doesn't really serve as much of an introduction and would have been better suited combined with chapter 3 on proportion. Chapter 2 is also an odd choice this early, "Body Cover Textures"; apart from the fact that it is very superficial, I think it would have worked much better placed near the end before presenting fully-worked drawings as a sort of tie-up of all the information presented to that point. Chapter 3 is also quite superficial, with only basic diagrammatical side views of a lion, dog, horse, cow and chimpanzee and what to me least is a pointless comparison to the form of a human bent over into an quadruped stance! Chapter 4 is titled "Repose And Motion" and is a good basic introduction to movement and stance, but again I felt it was over-simplified and could have included more examples. The fifth and sixth chapters cover the form of the hind leg and the foreleg respectively, making a very valid comparison of the structure of these between different species. Chapter 7 is on the form of the trunk, starting with a comparison of vertebral columns and then shifting abruptly to sketches of lions in repose before going back to sketches and then to almost-pointless comparisons of the thorax, isolated from the rest of the form. Chapter 8 is on head forms, and here the author includes a number of detailed skull drawings and anatomical views, with some skillful simplifications of the overall forms into broader masses but unless one wants to draw animal skeletons I can't see the real point of this. Sure, simplifying form is one of the basic tenets of drawing today but surely this is better suited to the outside structure, not internal details that have only limited bearing on the final form. The final chapter is titled "Coming To Terms With The Whole Animal Figure" and you will no doubt be surprised to discover there are only four drawings, all with simplified forms, with 12 sketches, some of which are extremely loose.

I'm sure if one were willing to read through the text completely and follow the accompanying drawings it all might make some sort of sense, but I found it disjointed and a bit aimless in its approach. Overall I was extremely disappointed with the book as a whole and would only recommend getting it as an adjunct to other, better, books and even then only if you got it cheap like I did.

Rating:
Summary: AN ESENTIAL ARTISTIC REFERENCE TO THE ANIMALS ANATOMY
Review: I have a Germany edition of this book, and want to found a Spanish or English translation. This book seems at least so good as the Gottfried's Human Anatomy. Please, give me information to get them. I'm Antonio, and my e-mail is [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: Buy Jack Hamm's book instead
Review: Since I had found Bammes' "The Artist's Guide to Human Anatomy" helpful, I ordered his animal anatomy book without ever having seen it. What a mistake. There were a few well done, loose, expressive drawings, but most of the drawings that purported to be realistic were badly drawn. I'm not talking about niceties such as line quality, or rendering of surface details either. There were gross perspective and proportional errors in far too many of the author's drawings! Buy Hamm's "How to Draw Animals" instead. It may have a dated look, but the information is still first rate, and the drawings are accurate.

Rating:
Summary: Buy Jack Hamm's book instead
Review: Since I had found Bammes' "The Artist's Guide to Human Anatomy" helpful, I ordered his animal anatomy book without ever having seen it. What a mistake. There were a few well done, loose, expressive drawings, but most of the drawings that purported to be realistic were badly drawn. I'm not talking about niceties such as line quality, or rendering of surface details either. There were gross perspective and proportional errors in far too many of the author's drawings! Buy Hamm's "How to Draw Animals" instead. It may have a dated look, but the information is still first rate, and the drawings are accurate.