Drawing Hands & Feet || Eddie Armer

There’s more, of course, to figure drawing than just the extremities, but hands and feet are notoriously difficult to get right and errors here can mar an otherwise successful piece of work.

Eddie’s method is to proceed by way of examples and exercises, with plenty of diagrams and blocking outlines along the way. Instead of contemplating what appears to be a mountain – the sheer complexity of digitation, for instance – you start with simple shapes and work from there. Breaking the problem down to a series of what become much simpler stages suddenly makes it manageable and the possibility of understanding it more reasonable.

A lot of books on figure drawing include what amounts to a basic anatomy course. While this is undoubtedly useful, it can be daunting and, if this is something you feel you don’t need, the lack of it here should give your heart an immediate lift. This is art, not physiology. There’s plenty of guidance on perspective, which is most definitely something you need to get to grips with, as well as hands and feet from different angles and in different poses.

At 96 pages, this is a concise guide, but there’s no sense of anything lacking or of corners being cut and it should provide all the information you need.

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Beginner’s Guide to Life Drawing || Eddie Armer

This began life in the Masterclass series in 2013. The title page says “this edition published 2019”, which implies that there might have been some re-working of the original material, but I am unable to verify this possibility. It is certainly passing strange that a book originally intended for the more advanced worker can reappear as one for the beginner and I’m not sure that any amount of editing could effect that much of a change.

You can read the original review here.

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Life Drawing (Drawing Masterclass) || Eddie Armer

This isn’t so much a book about how to draw figures as what you can do with them. The biography that came with it tells me that Eddie is also a musician and there is certainly a fluidity and rhythm to his drawings that may or may not be connected. There is also a sense of improvisation that echoes Paul Klee’s comment about “taking a line for a walk”.

None of this matters really, as sources, influences and possible cross-overs have nothing to do with whether the book itself is any good and whether we like the illustrations and can learn from them. On the other hand, when Eddie does what he refers to as “scribble drawings” and creates seemingly random birds-nests from which a shape, then a recognisable figure emerge, I can’t help thinking of free jazz. For the uninitiated, someone once described that as sounding “like a pet shop burning down”, so I probably won’t labour the point.*

What’s exciting, though, is just how much Eddie is prepared to experiment and how he works with line, tone and perspective to produce figures that have that all-important quality of potential movement. The thing about people is that they’re never fully at rest. At any time they can change position, get up or run off, and a really successful drawing encompasses that quality.

The other thing this book lacks is anatomy. That’s not to say it isn’t important, but sometimes we don’t have to get bogged down in it and this is one of those times. I love this book for the way it celebrates the human form and, once again, Search Press are right on the button with their choice of author.

* For those of you who care, I’m thinking of the moment the melodic figure emerges from seeming chaos in Endangered Species on the Pat Metheny (et al) album Song X. Makes me cry every time and that’s not an easy thing to do. Or Morning Dew coalescing out of the free jam, Epilogue on the Grateful Dead’s Europe ’72.

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