I've been drawing for over 68 years and carrying a sketchbook for over 60 of those years. I've seen success as an author, I'm an award-winning illustrator of books and magazines and animated many classic Disney features. Am I an expert on sketching humans and animals? ...No. I'm constantly learning in my effort to capture humans and animals in action by following the basic principles of drawing as they apply to quick sketching. My learning is aided by these books as I prepare lesson plans or the encouragement and inspiration found within their pages. I'm married to LaVonne, my high school sweetheart of 50 years, and have three grown children and six grandchildren.
Gorgeous illustrations abound in this through presentation of the anatomy of human and animal bodies. Practical application, diagrams, charts, text, definitions, and more have made this coffee table size book a go-to reference for me over the years.
Comparative anatomy of humans and animals has been a primary interest and subject of study of mine. I teach this topic and it is constantly brought into use in my quick sketching, illustration, and animation. I consider this a must-have for anyone interested in human and animal anatomy.
Designed for both professional and amateur artists, Cyclopedia Anatomicae is an essential guide to mastering the fundamentals of anatomical drawing. In addition to the human figure, it covers horses, dogs, cats, pigs, apes and more. Detailed, fully annotated illustrations of the skeletal, joint, and muscular systems clarify the proportions of each body type and lay the foundation for reproducing movements with true-to-life accuracy. With more than 1,500 illustrations, tips on drawing techniques, and informative explanations of the basics on human and animal anatomy, Cyclopedia Anatomicae provides the helpful guidance any artist can use.
I didn’t know anything at all about meteorites (or, really, space in general) until I took a cosmochemistry class during my first semester of a PhD program in geology. As soon as I learned that meteorites captured information about the start of the Solar System – the material we started with, hints about how planets evolve, and how meteorites changed the course of Earth – I was hooked. At the end of that class in 2007, I switched the main topic of my PhD research to studying meteorites and what they can tell us about the past, and I have been doing it ever since.
Like many folks, I am fascinated with the “where we came from” question. And for me, this is the quintessential book to dive into this topic from an evolutionary biology perspective.
Correct or not, I fancy myself someone that knows a decent amount about evolution and the human body, but I was captivated by the parts of the human body that have endured, for good or for bad, the long journey of us crawling out of the ocean and eventually into the office cubicle.
This book isn’t as laugh-out-loud funny as some others I generally like, but it really is a great book, and I had a hard time putting it down.
The paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-discovered Tiktaalik, the “fish with hands,” tells a “compelling scientific adventure story that will change forever how you understand what it means to be human” (Oliver Sacks).
By examining fossils and DNA, he shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our heads are organized like long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genomes look and function like those of worms and bacteria. Your Inner Fish makes us look at ourselves and our world in an illuminating new light. This is science writing at its finest—enlightening, accessible and told with irresistible…
For 10 years, I edited Morbid Curiosity magazine. I believe that curiosity is the most important aspect of being human. More than the simple desire to know things, curiosity is a tool as powerful as a scalpel or a searchlight. Curiosity is a way to effect change, in our own lives and in the world. Morbid Curiosity magazine taught me to believe in the power of story, especially in the form of memoirs. Only by telling our own stories can we overcome our fears and find inspiration in death. Investigating my own relationship with death led me to write This Morbid Life. These books illuminated my search.
Before she decided to study medicine, Christine Montross was a poet. She deploys the full beauty of language to explore how it feels to be a first-year medical student dissecting a cadaver in her gross anatomy class. Over the course of the year, Montross conveys much information about how the human body works and how doctors-to-be learn, but her primary focus is on her emotional journey, which spanned from being a student with no understanding beyond her own body to being someone able to heal anyone who comes to her for help. Lovely, powerful, and instructive, I hope this book is required reading for incoming med students.
A "gleaming, humane" (The New York Times Book Review) memoir of the relationship between a cadaver named Eve and a first-year medical student
Medical student Christine Montross felt nervous standing outside the anatomy lab on her first day of class. Entering a room with stainless-steel tables topped by corpses in body bags was initially unnerving. But once Montross met her cadaver, she found herself intrigued by the person the woman once was and fascinated by the strange, unsettling beauty of the human form. They called her Eve. The story of Montross and Eve is a tender and surprising examination of…
I didn’t always know that I wanted to be a doctor, perhaps because there were no doctors in my family, and I did not even realize that I wanted to (or could) go to medical school until I was almost done with college. Once I did realize this, however, it became immediately obvious to me that being a physician (a surgeon) was what I wanted to dedicate my life’s work to, and I have been passionate about it ever since. Probably the topics I am most passionate about after surgery are education, books, reading, poetry, etc., so this book lets both these passions dovetail beautifully!
The
thing that I really like about this book is that it is literally built around a
3-D model of the body embedded in the center of the book, so that as you turn
the pages, you uncover different layers of the body, since the model is built
in layers, each attached to the board-book-style pages. So, opening the cover (the skin, as it
were) of the book reveals a page on the dermal system, and the skeletal system,
and as you turn the next page, the ribs come with the page to reveal some of
the internal organs, and so on.
I am the author of two novels, and I currently teach fiction writing in the MFA program at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. I’ve long been fascinated with journeys both real and literary. In the early 1990’s I lived in Taiwan and traveled across China—from Guangzhou to the far northwestern desert province of Xinjiang, an extraordinary journey that informed my first novel.
There are dozens of journeys contained within this unclassifiable work of fiction. With each episode or story or exploration, the reader begins to perceive how travel transforms and erases us, even as it shows us the true strangeness of the world. If that sounds vague, then I’d say that you don’t read Flightsfor its many stories, as you do for Tokarczuk’s quiet, steely, attuned prose and exhilarating ideas.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE
A visionary work of fiction by "A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald" (Annie Proulx)
"A magnificent writer." — Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize-winning author of Secondhand Time
"A beautifully fragmented look at man's longing for permanence.... Ambitious and complex." — Washington Post
From the incomparably original Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in…
I didn’t always know that I wanted to be a doctor, perhaps because there were no doctors in my family, and I did not even realize that I wanted to (or could) go to medical school until I was almost done with college. Once I did realize this, however, it became immediately obvious to me that being a physician (a surgeon) was what I wanted to dedicate my life’s work to, and I have been passionate about it ever since. Probably the topics I am most passionate about after surgery are education, books, reading, poetry, etc., so this book lets both these passions dovetail beautifully!
This entire Magic School Bus series has also been a favorite of ours with our kids. I love the way that the bus goes inside of the human body and gets up close and personal with the cells of the human body. I remember thinking about how it made the difficult-to-see and -imagine immune system easy to picture in the mind of the reader.
THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS PRESENTS THE HUMAN BODY is a photographic nonfiction companion book to the original bestselling title, THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS INSIDE THE HUMAN BODY.
INSIDE THE HUMAN BODY taught thousands of kids about the incredible systems that work together to make the human body function. what makes us who we are. MAGIC SCHOOL BUS PRESENTS THE HUMAN BODY will expand upon the original title with fresh, updated Common Core-aligned content about our amazing bodies. With vivid full-color photographs on each page and illustrations of the beloved Ms. Frizzle and her students, the Magic School Bus Presents series…
I am a teacher, a mom, a bubbe, and a writer. I taught elementary school and college courses, directed a daycare, and owned a children’s bookstore, but my favorite job is scribbling words on paper. I have two grown children and four wonderful granddaughters who love to listen as I read to them. Many of my ideas come from my experiences with my granddaughters and from their questions. Our family and friends are a mix of religions and cultures, and most of my books reflect the importance of diversity, acceptance, and knowledge.
I am recommending this book because I love books that feature different cultures and different abilities.
This book has minimal text, so the illustrations carry the message. I love reading this book to my grandkids and talking about how people are different and the same, from noses to feelings to the clothes they wear.
I also love the Sesame Street characters in the illustrations.
Who better than Elmo and his Sesame Street friends to teach us that though we may all look different on the outside-deep down, we are all very much alike?
Elmo and his Sesame Street friends help teach toddlers and the adults in their lives that everyone is the same on the inside, and it's our differences that make this wonderful world, which is home to us all, an interesting-and special-place. This enduring, colorful, and charmingly illustrated book offers an easy, enjoyable way to learn about differences-and what truly matters. We're Different, We're the Same is an engaging read for toddlers…
Drawing and painting people has been my passion and my profession for a couple of decades now. Fine art, comic books, animation, illustration – as long as I'm drawing people, I'm happy. I love the challenge of trying to capture (or create) a living, breathing, thinking person on paper. And I love talking about art books with other artists. Which ones are great, which ones miss the mark, which ones have tiny hidden gems in them. This list is a mix of books I love, and books I heartily recommend.
You gotta know your sacrum from your humerus, and you've gotta know what your sterno-cleido-mastoid attaches to. Even if you forget the names, you've got to learn the shapes and the jobs. This book is pretty awesome for that. And it's pretty, too. I love the mix of photos and drawings. The transparency overlays of muscle over bone are crazy fun and might be that experience that triggers your flash of insight. This book isn't an art-school classic like, say Fritz Schider's Atlas of Anatomy for Artists, but it's good solid material. Drawing from a live model, with this book on your knee for reference? That's a good time.
Unlock your inner artist and learn how to draw the human body in this beautifully illustrated art book by celebrated artist and teacher Sarah Simblet.
This visually striking guide takes a fresh approach to drawing the human body. A combination of innovative photography and drawings, practical life-drawing lessons, and in-depth explorations of the body's surface and underlying structure are used to reveal and celebrate the human form.
Combining specially-commissioned photographs of models with historical and contemporary works of art and her own dynamic life drawing, Sarah leads us inside the human body to map its skeleton, muscle groups, and body…
Most people think of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece as horror, but the truth is – and I love this fact! – Frankenstein is widely considered to be the first science fiction novel. I’ve always been fascinated with the origin story of the novel: Lord Byron’s ghost-story writing competition proposed among friends at Geneva’s Villa Diodati in 1816. I’ve watched every movie version of that iconic gathering. (Most are bad. Oh well.) As a college professor, I taught Frankenstein in a writing class. (I was also a preschool teacher. Honest! Those kids read other books.)
This is such a fascinatingly researched book about the science during the time Mary Shelley created Frankenstein. I was surprised and enthralled to learn how many real-life Victor Frankensteins there were in Victorian England, all trying to be the first to reanimate a dead corpse. The accounts of grave robbery and, yes, even murder (The fresher the corpse, the better the experiment!) had me hooked throughout.
Also intriguing was how this macabre practice was deemed by many to be the cutting edge of science. I feel the theme is especially resonant today as we face our own life-creating hubris with Artificial Intelligence.
The Lady and Her Monsters by Roseanne Motillo brings to life the fascinating times, startling science, and real-life horrors behind Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein.
Montillo recounts how—at the intersection of the Romantic Age and the Industrial Revolution—Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein was inspired by actual scientists of the period: curious and daring iconoclasts who were obsessed with the inner workings of the human body and how it might be reanimated after death.
With true-life tales of grave robbers, ghoulish experiments, and the ultimate in macabre research—human reanimation—The Lady and Her Monsters is a brilliant exploration of the creation of Frankenstein, Mary…
Born at the base of the beautiful Wasatch Mountains, I began exploring and sketching the world—as most children do—at a very early age. I continued to pursue not only my artistic path through traditional schooling, higher education, and endless hours of practice, but also my love of storytelling. Intrigued by Science Fiction and Fantasy, many of my projects reflect elements of the fantastic, but I also appreciate the beauty and elegance in fine art masterpieces. I studied illustration and graphic design at Utah State University and the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. I currently live in Salt Lake City with my beautiful wife and four boys, where I continue to write, paint and draw regularly.
This is the artist's anatomy book I grew up studying throughout high school and college, and it goes deep into the structural and anatomical anatomy of the body. It gives good illustrative examples of the skeletal and muscular systems as well as providing a few photographic references for both male and female anatomy. It is a pretty old volume, having been originally published in 1957, but the principles remain the same and it holds up pretty well. For anyone serious about learning to not only draw or paint from life, but also the imagination, I highly recommend this foundational and educational reference guide.
"I recommend Fritz Schider's Atlas of Anatomy for Artists to those who wish to increase their understanding of the human figure." — Robert Beverly Hale, Lecturer on Anatomy, Art Students League of New York. Adopted by Pratt Institute, Cleveland School of Art, Art Students League of New York, and others.
For more than forty years, this book has been recognized as the most thorough reference book on art anatomy in the world. Schider's complete, historical text is accompanied by a wealth of anatomical illustrations, plus a variety of plates showcasing master artists and their classic works on the anatomy of…
