Figure It Out! Human Proportions: Draw the Head and Figure Right Every Time (Christopher Hart Figure It Out!)

I have a lot of drawing books, but this looked like a good, concise review of proportions, which is always something that trips many artists up. It was actually much more in-depth than I expected. I have other books that provide good, general info on proportions, but this covered everything I could think of. Things I didn’t even know they had rules for. For example, how big to make the eye in side view. How far back to place the eye in side-view, etc. Everything is accounted for: how big to make the hands/feet, how long the arms are, etc etc.

However, at least one of the drawings in the book is not right. The illustration on page 59 comes to mind. A mini-lesson on a 3/4 view head, where the ear is WAY too far forward. Looks very bizarre. I don’t think anything else jumped out at me, and things seemed to mesh with what I’ve read in other books, so I’d definitely recommend this one, especially if you’re needing to know how to draw the human body from imagination, like if you’re doing comic or illustration work.

Earlier this year, I wrote a positive review for Chris Hart’s book, “Figure It Out! The Beginner’s Guide to Drawing People.” I still give that book a favorable review. It goes over the shapes in the human figure very well. But while working with that book, I realized I had some questions that simply weren’t answered. I’m sure with practice and the book’s guidance, I would have eventually figured it out, but that would have taken a lot of time. “Figure It Out! Human Proportions” saved that time. All the questions I had were answered with this book. With that being said, this is what I will recommend: You should buy them both, this one for building a figure that looks right, the other for correcting the shapes of the anatomy. (I believe the publisher would do well to create a package with both of them together at a discount rate, but that’s just my opinion.) But if you can only buy one, “Figure It Out! Human Proportions” should be the one you buy, but set your sites toward getting “Figure It Out! The Beginner’s Guide to Drawing People” later. Both are excellent and complement each other. Both are written so a bright tween or a young teen can understand them, but adults who use them don’t feel like they’re using a children’s book. Both go into enough detail to be complete, but don’t go into so much detail that the beginning artist feels like he or she had to draw a blueprint of a human figure before drawing a figure. As I said before, buy both books discussed, but if you can only buy one, this is the one to buy.

Its good if you like the writers style. I recommend going out of order. Start working on proportions before drawing the face. Spend a lot of time on proportions then learn to draw the eyes, nose, ears.

After that move on to muscle groups. Spend a few days on each, at least 3 hours a day. You will get good quick as long as you learn to self correct… Also another tip. Use blue pencils for your rough and restate the lines. Then finish with normal pencils over the blue.

I love this book and is Exactly what I was looking for. It isn’t a how-to-draw book, it shows (simple) figures and explains where things on the average body will line up. A few proportions were pretty common knowledge but this book went way beyond that. Like where the arch of the eyebrow generally is in relation to the eye. So many of these types of proportions I have never known about until reading this book! This book is brilliant and a must for artists!

Wenn man das Grundsätzliche mitbringt, ist das eine wunderbare Ergänzung. Es erklärt die anatomischen Zusammenhänge mehr in Bildern als in Text, also bitte nicht vom Englischen abschrecken lassen. Ich leihe das Buch regelmässig Freunden aus weil sie es auf Anhieb nützlich finden.
Denn: ”Wenn deine Proportionen richtig sind, sieht deine Zeichnung richtig aus!” – C. Hart 🙂

I’ve read a lot of books on drawing and this is great if you are looking for a guide to sketching people (as opposed to figure drawing, which is far more detailed.) I enjoy sketching, quick drawings that capture the feel of the scene, and wanted to include people, but had issues with proportion – no longer. This book allowed me to make rapid progress in this regard. It covers all the parts of people as well as the whole person in a way that makes it easy to look at a person and then draw them. It does not go into great detail on how to make photo-realistic drawings, rather it discusses the basic idea behind proportion of faces, hands, feet, whole bodies, etc.

I particularly liked how the first third (or half!) of the book was not committed to materials, like many art instruction books. If you have one of that type of book you don’t need any more, yet almost every publisher appears to start off with a huge chunk of pages on that topic in ~every~ book they publish – this book does not suffer from that annoying feature.

Lots of illustrations and text – a good balance of describing the ideas behind the techniques and examples of how to implement them. This is not one of those “Three easy steps to painting the Mona Lisa for Non-Painters” books. The author shows steps in enough detail that I had no issues following what they were suggesting.

I liked this book well enough to get another book by the same author (Figure it out! The Beginners Guide to Drawing People) which is also a great book with the same approach to solid content and lack of fluffy copy-and-paste filler.