Drawing Animals Using Grids

Description

If you have often struggled to draw animals, from master artist Giovanni Civardi comes this highly visual beginners guide to drawing dogs, cats and horses using the traditional grid technique - a method that makes the first stages of drawing simple and achievable. Giovanni Civardi shows you how to create an accurate pencil sketch of the subject by laying a grid over a photo or drawing and transferring the image to the drawing surface one square at a time. Beginning with a summary of animal anatomy and basic drawing techniques, this book contains over 90 outlines of dogs, cat and horses in a range of static and moving poses, with guidance on how to add shading and tonal effects to create more detailed finished drawings.

Giovanni Civardi is a best-selling Italian artist and author, with over 600,000 copies of his books sold worldwide in English alone. Civardi was born in Milan, Italy in 1947. While training to become a sculptor, portrait artist and illustrator at the Free Life-Study School of the Accademia di Brera, he also studied medicine and surgery. For over a decade, he worked as an illustrator, producing commissions for newspapers, magazines and book covers. During frequent trips to France and Denmark, Civardi put on one-man exhibitions of this work and pursued his interest in studying the relationship between medical anatomy and the human form as depicted by the artist. His experience gained from teaching anatomy, life drawing and portraiture in schools and institutions over many years has led to the publication of numerous books in which Civardi's experiences are brought into focus. For more work and information visit his website: www.giovannicivardi.it.

The idea behind this series is simple and easy to comprehend - it does what it says on the tin. Each subject is overlaid by a co-ordinated grid, so that all the main points of shape and composition can easily be transferred the finished image. It's a long-established and well-tested technique that simply works. What makes these volumes particularly useful, as well as the quality of the illustrations, is the amount of background material - structure, anatomy and features - that prefaces each set of drawings. In the animals volume, these are not just general but applied to each type - so, dogs, horses, cats. When it comes to people, these are structure, movement and posture. The main sections here divide into character, babies and children, and figures in action. -- Henry Malt * Artbookreview.net * Top quality drawing book with plenty of projects to try. 240 pages of well presented drawings of animals using grids. A good quality book with plenty of hints and tips to try, this will keep me occupied for many months trying all the ideas out. The pictures are broken down into shape and size, structure and proportions, volume and shadows, including tonal study to help. -- Jenny Nixon * Amazon * Giovanni Civardi is nothing if not prolific, but the continuing popularity of his books testifies to their quality and the Drawing with Grids series offers an interesting take on a variety of subjects. Animals and People have just appeared and deal with tricky subjects in a particularly straightforward way. The main instructional pages cover a single subject in a single spread, with the basic grid and simple progressive stages from outline to tonal studies. Each book contains an excellent variety of material. -- Henry Malt * The Artist *