The Book of a Hundred Hands (Dover Anatomy for Artists) - Hardcover

Bridgman, George B

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1626543453 ISBN 13: 9781626543454

Publisher: Echo Point Books & Media, 2015

Synopsis

The Book of a Hundred Hands is exactly what it sounds like. With this delightful little book George Bridgman has handed the world's artists a remarkable resource. As he points out, the human hand has a tremendous capacity for expression, and the attentive artist takes advantage of this potential to imbue their work with detail and meaning. After all, we can tell a lot about a person from their hands: everything from a subject's age and gender, to their psychological and emotional states, and even occupation.

With 100 carefully-selected illustrations that clearly identify the regions of the hand in a variety of positions, The Book of a Hundred Hands is the perfect workbook and reference for any artist, beginning or experienced. Whether you read it as a textbook or pull it from your shelf for inspiration when you're stumped on a particular hand-rendering problem, this book is a worthy addition to any artist's library. The lessons it contains are sure to elevate your human figures to new levels of expression and detail.

Readers interested in related titles from George B. Bridgman will also want to see: Heads, Features and Faces (ISBN: 9781626544970 ).

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Mr. Bridgman states unequivocally in his introduction that before preparing this book he had "not discovered a single volume devoted exclusively to the depicting of the hand." Apparently Mr. Bridgman has appreciated what few others have felt—the human hand's great capacity for expression and the care that the artist must take to realize it. The hand changes with the age of the person, is shaped differently according to sex, reflects the type of work to which it is put, the physical health, and even the emotions of the person. To represent these distinguishing features, to capture the expressiveness of a particular pair of hands, the artist must understand the construction, anatomy, formation, and function of the hand.
There is probably no better instructor to turn to for this understanding than Mr. Bridgman, a well-respected artist who for nearly 50 years lectured and taught at the Art Students League of New York. In this volume, a full text is accompanied by many illustrations depicting virtually every aspect and posture of the human hand. He first considers the back view of the hand, the wrist bones, the tendons, the muscles, the hand bones, the arch, and the veins; and then those of the palm. Throughout he pictures the musculature at work beneath the surface of the skin. He continues by showing how the muscles operate on the thumb side and on the little finger side when each is the center of force; how the thumb and fingers are constructed, their freedom of movement, joints, and complete anatomy as well as views of them straight, bent, and flexed; how the knuckles are formed, what shapes the fist can take and how flexible it can be; and he concludes with illustrations of the total movement, either turning or rotary, of the hand in its various positions.
The 100 illustrations the author has selected perfectly define the regions of the hand so that any artist, beginning or experienced, will increase his mastery of it. Better rendering of the human hand is sure to add new expressiveness to your human figures along with new forcefulness and new interest.
Dover unabridged republication of the original (1920) edition.

About the Author:

Canadian artist George Brandt Bridgman (1865–1943) studied at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris and taught at New York City's Art Students League. Generations of students have learned the principles of anatomy and figure drawing from his books, which rank among Dover's most popular art instruction texts.

About this edition

• Publisher: Echo Point Books & Media
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1626543453
• ISBN 13: 9781626543454
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176