Animal Drawing: Anatomy and Action for Artists Paperback – June 1, 1959

Animal Drawing, Anatomy and Action for Artists is not a modern art instruction book with step by step demonstrations. Instead, it's a collection of splendid original drawings by master nature painter Charles R. Knight with tight, well-written short essays on drawing the creatures and using their skeletal and muscular anatomy to give them lifelike, accurate proportions.If I need to draw any animal, bird or reptile, I consult this book first. It's concentrated, very concise, lots of information packed into every drawing and every short essay. Birds, reptiles and amphibians are touched on. Representative examples of every general type of animal are included, although every time I go through it I find myself wishing he'd done about three or four volumes and gone into more different species.Charles R. Knight is the muralist responsible for many of the gorgeous dinosaur and prehistoric life paintings in natural history museums across the country. I first found his paintings at Chicago's Field Museum, but there are more in the Smithsonian and in Toronto and many other museums. His work is brilliant and gorgeous. Some of it has been rendered obsolete by modern dinosaur discoveries, but his mammals extinct and otherwise are still accurate and lifelike.I have been studying this book since my twenties and still not run out of times I need to go back and reference it for cat joints, birds' wings or cow proportions. A must-have for anyone who likes drawing and painting animals, a fun read for anyone who enjoys natural history. When my copy gets battered and starts losing pages, I replace it and pass the ratty one on to a student. I've done this three times and my fourth copy is starting to show wear.

Charles Knight is well known for his groundbreaking animal reconstructions. Even if this book isn't as heavily illustrated as I thought it would be, is full of useful advice from this incredible artist whose paintings did so much for natural history. I really enjoyed reading his extensive comments on each of the "animal type" chapters. The introduction, which is about animals through the history of painting and sculpture from the cave paintings to the XX century is simply great. The biggest section is the one about big cats, by the way, and all the drawings are superb.

not enough sketching of the various animals for any amount of training give a fish or teach to fish this text is no way expressed this to me

The unique thing about this book is that in addition to teaching about the structure of the animals, Knight talks about the psychology of the animal and how that affects portraying them. The section on hair tracts for felines and canines alone is worth the price of admission. It relies only on the author's drawings, which are quite good and illustrate the text well. However, you will want to look at great animal drawings by other artists. I've used this as one of the texts for classes I've taught at the college level.

Gave some drawing and some descriptions, but not really something I didn't know. The Canine was what I bought this for, and I got ONE drawing of a dog, then it's structure...and suddenly I was looking at a cat again. If I wanted to compare a dog vs cat anatomy, I would have flipped back.

My daughter loves it. This book tremendously helped her improve her artistic skills. I would highly recommend this to anyone.

The book claims in the title it is for artists, but provides no technical descriptions on how to portray each animal.It feels as though the author is simply describing their behavior for two pages, then pasting three or four pictures per family of animals. One example is the horse, whose many gaits he dedicates half a page to vaguely describing. But when it comes to displaying action, he only provides two pictures of a horse in motion.The only difference I find between this book and a Wikipedia search is one skeletal and one muscular drawing per animal type.

Great book by great artiest who studied zoo animals... not pictures. His talents were merged with those of scientists interested in showing how dinosaurs looked.