Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Before I found this book I remember thinking to myself, why isn't there a learn-to-draw book where you learn to draw the whole figure in stages, you know, instead of head on p. 20, hand on p. 160? Well, here it is! The problem with those other drawing books is most people will never have the discipline to make it all the way through, and, you're "learning" complex disparate processes individually then never returning to them, like cramming for an exam and then forgetting everything. Research shows intervallic review is the most effective learning technique. Here, you return to each area of the body in each stage and learn to draw them with increasing detail; this allows you to repeatedly return to your process of drawing each part and retain more of the information while ever increasing your sophistication and precision. This too is far more enjoyable and comforting because you're putting in work on all the parts in a relatively short time period and improving at drawing the whole body, rather than literally having to work for years on heads and torsos and limbs before even getting around to drawing hands and feet. The only issue for me is I make dolls--girl dolls--and most the figures in this book are men. Despite the drawn women on the front and back cover, all the photos inside are male, and I counted less than ten pages devoted to obviously female features. I'll have to get back to my big anatomical drawing books after this to improve my knowledge of feminine attributes, but I think this method is giving me the confidence to finally tackle those tomes. This is the most accessible method I've found, with a pleasurable easy-to-follow style; it keeps you motivated and hopefully leads to bigger and better things! UPDATE: Having completed all the exercises in this book, I can attest the above-stated appeal is utterly superficial. However alluring the fleshing-out and starting-with-the-basics system is, the book rapidly loses track of its own pedagogical approach. When it begins, the text and description matches the pictures and exercises, and one can internalize the figurative concepts and reproduce them spontaneously with individualized alterations from imagination--the goal of the artist. But quickly the descriptions deteriorate from matching the example drawings very specifically to vaguely generally, and one is left copying strange lines and shapes that are the author's personal secret fancies and reading words that are nonsense. Then I realized the provided drawings are actually amateur oddities. And NOTHING is retainable anyway. I read every page, copied every example, and did every exercise, and I feel I've learned nothing, have not improved in my anatomical artistic abilities whatsoever, and accomplished nothing but wasting time.