Customer Reviews

Comic Artist's Photo Reference - People & Poses: Book/CD Set with 1000+ Color Images (Comic Artists Reference)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I already own Buddy Scalera's Pose reference DVDs and was delighted to see he'd come out with a book. I am a professional storyboard artist and find the figure and light/shadow reference in this book to be extremely helpful. While it may be geared more to the comic book artist (fighting and swordplay poses); nevertheless, I think it is worth owning. It comes with a DVD with more material. For a modest price, I think it's a terrific source for anyone drawing the human figure.

I'll list the GOOD, then I'll list the Not-So-Good (aka. BAD).

The best two things about this book are:

1) A decent amount of images therein show the models in clothing (cloaks, some street clothing).
2) There's some decent reference of models holding weapons in "battle" poses.

That's it, really...

The *not* good (ie. BAD) things about the photograph are as follows:

1) The images are SMALL. Even the ones on the enclosed CD-ROM. Seems like the largest they get is around 700-800px on the longest side.

2) The camera's focal length causes the subjects to look distorted (ie. Huge hands close to the lens, tiny feet far away). For example:
http://is.gd/21M0

3) Only 4 models total. And two of them don't take their socks off. It may seem like a small thing, but not showing the feet is kind of huge. There's a lot of important detail in the tendons/bones/toes that is completely missing from half the images in this book.

4) The lighting creates strong shadows. This could be good or bad. Good because you get some nice play of light across muscles/tendons. Bad because sometimes parts of the model cast shadows on their face/etc, and obscures expressions and such.

All in all, it's OKAY. Frankly, I wouldn't buy it again. I'll keep it now that I have it, but my recommendation is to look elsewhere for a good reference book.

People and Poses is an excellent drawing reference for those interested in drawing human figure in action poses. This Impact title is chock full of spectacular photos of the human figure and contains a small amount of drawing instruction towards the end. I particularly like the 'couple's photos,' and the pictures depicting wounded/injured poses.

Overall, a great resource sure to please those interested in improving their art. 5 stars

GREAT GREAT GREAT!!!! I bought this book before it was widely released and brought it to one of my animation classes at school. All the other students liked it so much, they wanted a copy as well; but because at that time it was difficult to find, I had to watch my back to make sure nobody snatched my copy when I wasn't looking! This book is packed with lively and dramatic poses from fabulous perspectives! It's perfect for the animator, illustator, and comic book artist, helping the artist achive those hard-to-draw angles. I highly recommend this book!

I'm surprised by all the positive reviews that this book/CD has been given. I bought it based on the feedback from other buyers and I was pretty disappointed.

The lighting of most of the models is pretty good but the angle of too many of the photos is either straight-on or shot from above. This causes the models to look squatty and distorted. The choices for female models was pretty poor. I'm sure they are very beautiful in real life but their body types are not suited for this type of photography. I also discovered that there are photos featured in the book that are not included on the CD or website link. I was also disappointed to discover that the photos are not high resolution. They are only 72 dpi and not very good quality.

There are very few books like this on the market and something like this is a nice alternative to the expense and time associated with shooting your own photos. Unfortunately, this book will not be the alternative I was looking for. Hopefully Scalera will release a future edition that will address these problems.

This is a great book for artists in search of different poses to draw or paint from. The photography is good and allows adequate understanding of muscle and form. I also like that the figures are clothed. With children around and "non-artists" I like using a book that I don't have to feel like hiding everytime someone comes in the room. Do more of these books and I'll buy them. Great for "at home" gesture studies as well, and coupled with George Bridgeman or Hogarth (or any other anatomy book) it gives you some great models to learn from and study.

Bought the book because I have trouble finding models (or roping my friends into modeling). I was impressed by the crisp color photos, and the male models he picked to do the book (the females are o.k.) On the down side, he photographs only one pose per angle, and the lighting never changes. There are sections on capes, swords, smoking, fighting (the female fight scene is laughable), and very few street clothes pictures.

I have this book as well as the "Men & Boys" and "Women & Girls" books (received in a set as a gift), and all three have some very useful aspects. The photography here isn't great, but it serves a very specific function: these books are ONLY for reference and MAINLY for people needing to draw comics. These photos are not good for a project like a large, detailed painting or an anatomy study. The lighting is harsh and as some people have pointed out, camera angles can be weird and often exaggerate foreshortening and such. A lot of the poses are unnatural superhero nonsense or contain very dramatic, over-exaggerated body language.

If you've read modern comics at all, of course, you will know that a good understanding of strong lighting, random weird angles and foreshortening is exactly what you need. This book isn't for someone doing one big piece of art, but it IS intended for someone who wants to draw lots of smallish, somewhat abstracted human images. As many books on cartooning will tell you, making small, simple images "live" involves understanding the basic form and then exaggerating it a bit to create illusions of motion and/or depth. (Burne Hogarth's drawing books are wonderful studies as well, and he has one on cartooning specifically if I recall.)

Here you'll find lots of stuff with various weapons and capes and such, which is quite useful (capes, either superhero or medieval, can sometimes be a real pain to find real reference photos for!). I personally don't care about superheros, but luckily this book's poses are transferable to most story-telling. I suppose you could even use the "noble attitude, flying with cape" photos for other stuff. If you're not looking to draw comics, these types of photos might not be of as much use to you.

As with other books of this type, there's not much variety in body types. (Where are the fat people?? THIS JUST IN: FAT PEOPLE EXIST) Virtual Pose has nicer photos with a larger variety of models, better lighting, and fewer weird poses; it's up to you to decide what your needs are regarding reference photos and the content thereof. If you NEED dramatic lighting and weird poses, VP may be a bit mundane at times. It's worth noting that this series of books also costs less than the VP series by about 30% for most titles. VP does have some really nice specialty books (the one of kids and one themed around various 2-person poses come to mind). LiveModel's "Art Models" series is also great (and costs about the same as this series) and has nicer lighting and such, but again you see a more mundane collection of poses, though there are weapons and other items in many. (Also I suppose the nudity thing might be objectionable to stupid people. Dear anyone buying a photo reference book for someone else: artists see the naked body as a collection of shapes, much like any other object. It's not sexy. Not that random nudity is sexy anyhow, unless you're really desperate. Why does this culture insist on associating ALL nudity with porn?) LM uses an old version of quicktime for the DVD, which can be annoying.

Honestly, as another reviewer pointed out, it's worth having any or all of these series (and others!) if you can afford it! Any artist drawing for any purpose should always welcome photos of scantily-dressed or nude people posing in slightly (or very) odd ways, because it's easy to Google up a pic of someone sitting in a chair, but the Google method becomes less easy when you want a picture of, say, someone running forward to attack with a sword. The best you'll probably get is a screenshot from a movie, and those often don't make the best references (usually due to excess of clothing, camera obstacles, bad lighting, etc). Reference books/dvds like these are invaluable when you're wanting to draw something which is a common storytelling image but NOT a common type of photo.

This is fantastic photo reference for the comic artist (me)! These are nice sharp color photos. I don't agree that the shorter female model isn't good (she's not 40, she's 34!). She's got great fighting poses and expressions. I can take the shadows and apply them to taller characters as needed.

The male models are clearly bodybuilders. Their fighting pics are great. The women aren't super-muscular, but they are attractive and they have great poses and expressions.

The CD is excellent too. More photos beyond what is in the book, and a lot of cool/funny extra pictures, movies, etc.

Poses include: facial expressions, standing, sitting, lifting, cape, street clothes, swords, guns, fighting, wounded, scared, flying. Also romance, fighting, smoking, drinking, loading gun.

If I had to name things I wish were different... The capes are good, and I really like the shots of the models in regular clothes, but there could be more costumes. Still, for the excellent Amazon price, and so many photos plus poses that are tailor made for comics--I am a very happy customer.

I got this book to help not only with concept art work, but also with sculptural poses, and it's great! Realistic dynamism (tm) is what I call it.
If you don't find a pose that fits exactly what you're looking for, make sure you check out the accompanying CD. There are a lot of additional, excellent poses in there.
The only reason I don't give it 5 out of 5 is because that'd mean it's perfect, and nothing is perfect.