Success in Art: Drawing Hands & Feet

Never seen such a detailed book just on hands and feet. It attacks from both the visual angle as wella s the structural angle. After practising with this book, you can conquer one of the biggest bug-a-boos of a beginner artist.

AUTHOR

Ken Goldman is the author of Drawing Hands and Feet you can find out more about him and his work here.

WHO IS THE TARGET AUDIENCE

Drawing Hands & Feet has a broad appeal encompassing all those who aspire to improving their knowledge, skills and abilities in the creation of their own artwork. It is ideal for those who prefer the self-directed learning route, and would aid those students who wish to expand their knowledge and appreciation of alternative and traditional methods of drawing.

SYNOPSIS

The format of Drawing Hands and Feet is like many of its kind. The sections are laid out in a common sense manner as follows:

Introduction

Section 1: Tools & Materials

Section 2: Anatomy of Hands & Feet

Section 3 Drawing: Techniques

Section 4: Step-by-step Drawings

Conclusion and about the author

At first sight you may be forgiven for thinking that there is nothing remarkable or unique about this manual, but you would be mistaken. Drawing Hands & Feet is exceptional in every single way. It is true it has a similar page format to other publications of its kind but what elevates this particular guide is the quality of the illustrations and the invaluable information and advice from a contemporary, professional working artist of considerable talents.

In the pages of this manuscript, I found an abundance of essential, practical advice enhanced by high quality photographs, monochrome and color sketches, and full color anatomical illustrations. The sheer quality of the anatomical illustrations alone justifies the price of this work. The years of experience from the author and the practical methods described to enhance your drawing is second to none.

Artists quickly become aware that drawing or painting hands and feet poses a herculean problem early on in their art journey. They are the most complicated parts of the body to reproduce in a realistic manner and therefore it is helpful to have a step-by-step approach during the learning faze in order to control the multitudinal task posed by the complexity.

It is easy for me to sit here and try to convince you about the book, but to show you is another matter all together. Therefore, I thought I would put pencil to paper and see if I would benefit from the manual. Below you can witness the results. I am confident having tried the methods described in the book that you could benefit from its sage advice to.

CONCLUSION

Drawing Hands & Feet by Ken Goldman is an exceptional guide to the most difficult parts of the human anatomy to draw. Goldman took on the challenge of making the complex simple. He excelled beyond all expectation. I fully anticipate that this will sell out quickly when it becomes available in early June, 2020. I can’t wait to procure myself a copy. I give it my first 5 star rating of 2020 for an art book.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Walter Foster Publishing , NetGalley, and Ken Goldman for affording me the opportunity to review Drawing Hands & Feet.

Every experienced realist artist knows that the human figure is probably the most difficult subject, hands and foots are yet more so. While many times we do not paint or draw bare foots, it should be a pity not do so with the hands, as they are making so many activities and they are so expressive. This book is a wonderful treasure, as you find in it not only anatomy as needed, without being boring, but other useful sections too, like tools, strokes with graphite, contè, charcoal, structural and contour drawing, transfer techniques, perspective, step-by-step demonstrations. All very well explained and illustrated. Obviously you have to do your own homework and practice a lot, this book will be useful for reference in the near future.

Success in Art: Drawing Hands & Feet: Techniques for mastering realistic hands and feet in graphite, charcoal, and Conte
by Walter Foster Creative Team is a book I and from NetGalley and the review is voluntary. I really learned a lot from this book! I love trying my hand at graphite and charcoal and this was excellent! It covers light/dark, shading, perspective (which I have a very difficult time with), and all with realistic techniques. This has a lot of information crammed into a small book! This is one I am going to buy for sure! I need to quit reviewing to save myself money! 😊

This book came at a perfect time for me. I am a painter and I am trying to learn a new painting style, gestural figures. Improving my drawing skills is a huge help in painting. This book helped me understand the muscles and bone structure in the hand and feet.

The exercises in this book were very helpful. Hand and feet are illustrated in multiple positions and angles. Great step by step instruction. Other topics covered are perspective and foreshortening.

I highly recommend this book to any artist interested in figurative and portrait drawing and painting.

I received this galley from NetGalley.

One of the hardest aspects of realistic art is portraying hands and feet. I can say from personal experience I nearly failed drawing two because I struggled so much with them. The fact I even got a good grade was I am sure my teacher took pity on the endless hours I labored over this task. Some of my worst and yet proudest drawings where the grades I eked out of those efforts despite how awful I am positive they are...

This book is a wonderful treasure for artists it covers anatomy, shading, positions, structure and also delves into tools perspective and so much more. Everything is incredibly well explained with fantastic pictures of truly well done drawings and illustrations. I highly recommend this book.

I received this book from NetGalley and Quarto Publishing - Walter Foster for an honest review.
#SuccessinArtDrawingHandsFeet
#NetGalley

I am an artist with some figurative work under belt. It has not been my main focus, and moreover, hands and feet have always been the most slow and painful. So I was very interested in reviewing this book to train me in drawing hands and feet with a sense of greater effortlessness, and am reviewing this book from the perspective of many years of painting and drawing but not quite enough figurative work, something I'd like to change. I own a great deal of art books and anatomy books, a fairly immense art library.

I'm glad to have found this book and cannot wait for it to arrive in print (I am reviewing an advanced digital copy).

As with most art books, there is a section on tools and there are sections on technique. I suspect nearly any artist or would-be artist coming to a manual on hands and feet will not need the tools section, and many may not need most of the common technique sections of negative space or finding measurement with a divider or pencil or other tool. I did not see anything new here, but it is a short section.

There is a section on perspective, probably necessary, as even if one knows this subject fairly well, the application to hands and feet can result in errors. I like that the author takes a simple object - a paper-towel empty cardboard roll - and holds it alongside arms and more to demonstrate perspective.

There is emphasis on seeing the true entire outer shape in FLAT viewpoint, and then overlaying shading upon that for the perspective, and to allow the ability to truly see the art -- the hallmark of rendering correctly, correct sight. Seeing is everything in art, seeing is the great secret. I like that there is emphasis on this.

The meat of the book begins with anatomy, and this is the best book I've seen on hand and feet anatomy, and the lower legs and lower arm portions leading to these appendages. The anatomy is shown in many high-angle perspective views of various sorts, highly interesting! And incredibly detailed.

Possible ranges of motion are covered from every angle. I like that different shapes of feet and hands are portrayed.

There are pages and pages and pages of various drawing examples of all angles of hands and feet, crossed and in various poses. I think a main tenet of learning to draw is just to keep drawing the same thing over and over, and even spending time tracing a single image a few times or few dozen times before "going solo" is often advised in art training. Here are so many examples of hands and feet that one could be kept busy for a long while simply tracing or copying these images, gaining some mastery before working with models, if a student so chooses.

Drawings are taken from outline to final over succeeding drawing images in perfect clarity. In the beginning images one sees the anatomy, and in the final the shading to perfection.

Ken Goldman writes:
"The process of drawing can be divided into three stages: (1) absorbing optical sensations...(2) analyzing those sensations....(3) getting to work...."

He is writing of learning to see, and this entire volume is done to perfection to take even a beginner from the beginning stages of thinking they already do see, to the end stages of knowing how little they knew at the start of this volume, how much they know now, and how much further they need to go to obtain mastery.

HIGHLY recommended, I'm ordering a print copy! Thank you to Ken Goldman, to Walter Foster Publishing (Walter Foster is another great artist!) and to NetGalley for an advanced digital copy for review. This is my honest opinion.

Many of us have problems drawing hand and feet, the the extent that some of us try to leave them out all together or only partially draw them in. This book is very helpful in helping to understand both the hands and feet, starting with a skeleton view to muscular actions, whilst also covers perspective. There are a series of exercises to do to get some practice in various poses to draw. A really informative book

Success in Art: Drawing Hands and Feet
By Ken Goldman

This book is one I would recommend to artists wishing to focus on anatomy and more accurate drawing of hands and feet. The book presents information on tools and materials, anatomy of hands and feet, drawing techniques and includes step-by-step drawings to follow as a variety of subjects have been created.

Comments I jotted down while reading:
* Similar materials and tools as in other books
* direct vs structural approach
* concise information
* explicit descriptions
* informative
* educational
* perspective (good idea to include)
* more advanced (than some books
* some new ideas and terms

This book made me wonder how I would do in a life drawing class and might have intimidated me in trying my hand at timed sketches. That said, the author mentioned three stages of drawing 1) absorbing optical sensations, 2) analyzing those sensations and 3) getting to work. I believe that third phase means we should not allow ourselves to be intimidated but instead to pick up pencil and begin drawing.

Did I enjoy this book? Yes

Thank you to NetGalley and Quarto Publishing Group – Walter Foster for the ARC – This is my honest review.

5 Stars

Outstanding. Just that. This book is outstanding. I’m a professional artist and I still stumble over the drawing of hands and feet. At last the master has produced a very detailed in depth book.