Customer Reviews

9 Heads: A Guide to Drawing Fashion (3rd Edition)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a fashion design student, I was required to purchase this text several years ago. My drawing teacher insisted it was the industry standard, but I certainly don't think it's the best. While it provides good information about proportion and sketching the elongated fashion figure, the croquis in 9 Heads just aren't that attractive. They're often in very strange poses and the heads seem to be very large, while the necks and limbs are a bit thick, giving the illusion of a clunky figure rather than an elegant, slim one. While that's certainly easy to fix on your own, sometimes you just need a good croquis right away, which is why we buy books like this! It just doesn't deliver. There are very few back views, and the sections on drawing men and children are very limited, so don't buy it for that. Furthermore, the book is large and unwieldy, and it is impossible to make it lie flat, so it's very difficult to trace the croquis from it - something very important in a croquis book!

This book also showcases great fashion illustrations from various artists and designers interspersed throughout, which are inspiring, but can also be frustrating since they look NOTHING like the provided croquis and the book doesn't do a good enough job of instructing how to make your drawings look like that.

This book is great for helping with flats, though, especially in the "Encyclopedia of Details" section, which offers tons of examples. That's definitely the part I use most often. The sections on drawing hair, faces, hands, and other details are also pretty decent.

I recently acquired Bina Abling's "Fashion Sketchbook" and would definitely recommend that over 9 Heads if you can only afford one. The poses are much better, and it has many other techniques not found in 9 Heads, such as step-by-step instructions to render different fabrics realistically.

I was really weary of buying this book because of the price, but I actually got it for a discounted price and it's SO worth it. It's a huge book and this new edition includes chapters on men and children. Personally I got it because I'm applying to F.I.T in NYC and I need help with my sketching skills (I have none). I found this book to be the best that I have seen and it has helped me so much. The instructions and the "9 heads" theory (9 heads make up the human body) are very simple and easy to understand. I love that she uses the "box" method to help you draw faces. I have never been an artist and this book helped me to draw some fabulous fashion sketches. SO worth the money if you really need to learn to sketch for fashion design.

I teach fashion design at the high school level and graduated from FIT with a fashion design degree, so I've seen many books and am not easily impressed. I've had this book in my classroom for 3 years now and my students LOVE it. I have 2 copies in my classroom and students use it every day. This is the best (though expensive) comprehensive book I could find. I have lots of other books for students to look at while drawing, but they always seem to want this one the most.

This book is great because it helps you understand how to draw details like buttons, zippers and ruffles. My students find inspiration for new ideas here. The best part of the book is all the flats. I also like how comprehensive the book is- it covers children's, men's and women's wear.

The drawback of the book is that it obviously teaches 9 heads instead of 10 (we used 10 heads at FIT and I use 10 in my class as well). It seems like the current trend in design is a taller body. Also limiting for designers, the parts of the book that teach the whole body lean toward the illustrative side, not design. But the students love looking at these pages as well.

Despite the others' opinions of Nancy's style, I find her work to be quite beautiful. This is perhaps an interesting book to LOOK at, BUT if used for more than eye candy, I found it to be very inadequate. Our school uses 9Heads as a textbook...although there is little to no explanation on how to achieve her illustrations. These minimal lessons in this book are very hard to follow and do not serve as an adequate how-to or demonstration book.

I am using this book for a design and illustration class in the retail merchandising program. The book has a lot of great pictures and broke down the steps of drawing really well. I never considered myself a good artist, but I am pleasently surprised by how well I have done and the progression I have made in this class, and I think Nine Heads had a lot to do with it!!!

As a fashion student this book is my bible. I use it as a reference for all of my illustrations and my flats. Also has a great section with details drawn close up. Helps a lot when you are trying to draw something with a more complicated detail. I would recommend this to everyone.

My brother bought me '9Heads' for my birthday... unfortunately what came in the mail was 'Colors for Modern Fashion', the companion book. It is also written by Nancy Riegelman and also by Nine Heads Media. When I tried selling it here on amazon again, typing in the ISBN gave me this particular product page: 9Heads, 3rd edition. There must be something off with the ISBN numbers or people sell the companion under the wrong heading. Both books are amazing and I can't wait to get into them, but you want to start with drawing the fashion figure if you are completely new to it (9Heads) and later move on to using color markers (Colors for Modern Fashion from Nine Heads Media). I hope this helps anyone not run into the same mistake as I did.

I was going through old books... And pulled out this gem. Simply put, 9Heads was for me in a few nights of practice a far superior "teacher" than the sum of any other illustration/art classes when I was in school.

This book is used in a technical college for an apparel design class. My daughter requested it because it teaches you many ways to illustrate texture in fashion. She really likes it.

My daughter is a fashion design student and her fashion drawing professor suggested she try to find a copy of this book, which is out of print, since she said it is the last word in drawing bodies for fashion design.