Customer Reviews

Virtual Pose 2: The Ultimate Visual Reference Series for Drawing the Human Figure

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This product is a MUST-HAVE for all artists! Life drawing skills are important for all artists... I work in the game industry, often 60+ hours a week; There just aren't enough hours in the day to make it to a life drawing class. And that's where the Virtual Pose series saves the day!

Thanks to Mario Chakkour's Virtual Pose series I am able to improve my life drawing skills without having access to live models!

It's a quality product all around, but it's really the CD-ROM that shines. You open up a model to draw, spin him/her into the position you want - and draw! AMAZING. GENIUS. And what a great deal! There are other companies selling inferior product for 10, 15 times as much.

TIP: If you're a beginner to computers, there's a nice interface to help you through and gives you nice music to listen to while you draw... But if you have any computer skills at all, open up ("explore") the CD-ROM and you can double-click the .MOV files and enlarge them to full screen! That's one more massive plus about this product, you're NOT forced to go through a custom interface to view the models unless you choose to.

I highly recommend this product. It is truly rare these days to find such a high-quality product for such an affordable price. Get it now and build your life drawing skills!

- Matthew G. Cox...

Any artist interested in portraying the human form knows how expensive model fees can be. Traditional pose books are often very good, but naturally show only one or two angles of the same pose. This can be especially frustrating for artists working in three dimensions, like I do.

In this book/CD set, Chakkour has compiled 34 female poses and 18 male poses, some in color and others in black and white. The model is posed on a "lazy susan" type turning platform, which is turned a few degrees for each still shot. This means that the very good lighting is constant at every angle, allowing for clear veiw of the body's curves and cast shadows. In those poses where the model is extremely "exposed" (legs overhead, for instance), there is very faint, tasteful shading that does nothing to detract from the usefulness of the shot.

Each pose is given one full page of the book, with six views of the pose displayed on the page. The companion CD-ROM (PC/MAC compatible) then displays each pose in nearly seamless 180 degrees. Using the mouse, the user can rotate the model the full 180 degrees, backward and forward.

I have a few very minor quibbles that I hope Chakkour will address in the next volume. First, a top-down view would be extremely valuable for sculpture work, but I can see how setting up the shot may make this unfeasible. Second, some of the poses aren't very dynamic, or the models look stiff and unnatural. Third, in a very few occasions, I've seen the pose change slightly as I rotate the model. That is, an arm or head drops a little more at each turn of the platform, until it's several inches lower than the starting pose.

None of these quibbles are serious deterrents, however, and the book/CD remain my single favorite tool for working at my home studio. Now if I could just figure out how to rotate the model without getting clay on the mouse...

This product is very much worth its price- a keeper for someone learning life drawing. The models are beautiful, and the variety of poses is very nice. The ability to rotate the models around in 360 degrees allows selection of the exact pose- choosing the proper lighting and shadow, and allows an infinite variety of poses for drawing practice- or perhaps even sculpture creations.

Suggestions/Negatives: The creators of this software should add some classical background drawing music into the program, or scrap the cheezy MIDI music all together. What would be really nice would be a SAVE feature to return quickly to the model, pose, and degree of rotation that you were previously working on. What really irks me about the program is the long startup and shut down times- the producers/authors force you to watch their intro and exit credits & bells and whistles- wouldn't it suffice to only see this during the (one time) installation? A single splash page during startup of the program would suffice- let us artists get on with drawing! Another nice feature would be the ability to import additional models from the producer in the future. Perhaps these suggestions will occur in version 3 or 4 if enough users pester the producer to incorporate them into future versions. More instructional movies than the 4 that come with the program would add to its features.

Virtual Pose is a great idea but could have been executed better. There are six photos to a page with a large margin so the photos are pretty small. More than two thirds are in black and white. Every other page on the left is a sketch so there are no photos there. The photos on the included CD are very small and can not be zoomed in without getting fuzzy.

All color, less blank space, and high resolution on the CD would make this much better.

If you want full color and high resolution, try other books. For example, check out "Art Models" instead. You can get it with a disk that has all the photos and they can be zoomed in so they are HUGE.

This book is a great idea. For those who do not have access to live "in person" classes with models for figure drawing, this book is an adequate substitute.

I love the idea, but I have some frustrations with this book.

First of all, some of the female models are very skinny. There is not enough variation of bodies in the female section for truly interesting drawings/paintings. Also, the poses are kind of awkward at times.

The most frustrating thing about this set is that the photos are not very clear in the book, and on CDROM screen, they are better, but the shadowing is not defined enough. I would like more intense lighting for more defined contrasts to draw from. More beautiful drawings would be spawned with more intense lighting contrasts to bring out the contours with more definition.

That being said, this idea is a very good one. I appreciate what this book is trying to do, the modesty with which the models are handled, and the efforts made to make the models accessible from many visual perspectives.

If some of these other issues were to be addressed in further editions, it would be a fantastic series even more useful.

I purchased this product as a substitute for a live model for sculpture. The idea of 360 degrees intrigued me. I was disappointed at the small, low resolution images. I was amazed to see censorship of the female models. It's like a nude model wearing a swimsuit to an art class. As a sculptor, I had hoped for a view from above. The zoom feature was disappointing because it only magnifies the center. For example, you can't just zoom in on the head. Overall, a little disappointing.

The book's great. Nothing but pages of nude models, but unlike other nude model books, this one devotes each page to a single pose as seen from all 360 degrees. Meaning, if there's a pose of a girl posing sitting down Indian style with her arms folded, you don't just see the pose from strait on or from the side, you get to see it as if you were walking around her. Great for any artists out there.
To top it off, there's a CD that has a handful of models and a few dozen poses that you can simply click on and rotate 360 degrees. It's perfect. There's even more features, but that's the best. Just a great product.
There's a few different female models and I think two male. There's great range in body type which is something you don't see that often.
If your an artist who paints or draws the human figure, definately get this book. You won't be sorry.

I think the book is wonderful, and has many active poses which I find very useful, but I would have liked the book much better if there had been an even distribution of poses between men and women. I also would have preferred a side-by-side format where you could see the woman in one pose and the man in an identical pose beside her. In this way you could see the differences more clearly between how a woman should be drawn and how a man should be drawn. As it is the women take up the majority of the front of the book and the men the back 1/3, and there are absolutely no shared poses.

If you wish you had models to pose for you in strange and unnatural poses, this is the book for you. But if you were hoping for natural poses (woman sitting in chair, man walking, woman climbing stairs, man throwing ball, woman picking up object from floor, that type of thing) that you might use in illustrations, you, like I, would be sadly disappointed. I'm returning it!

As an aspiring cartoonist and animator, the figure alone stands as the basis and cornerstone of ANY artistic undertaking relating to these fields. In the process of my self-education of art and drawing skills, a significant roadblock presents itself again and again...where to find decent subjects with which to practice. With a wealth of knowledge lying in the books that I have purchased (Nicolaides, Bridgman, Hogarth, Ames, Edwards, etc.) it is not only necessary, but ESSENTIAL to be able to find suitable subjects with which to practice and develop one's skill. I've tried everything from sketching my roommates to trying to find pictures online (giving less than satisfactory or savory results I might add). I had almost given up until I happened upon this product by Mr. Chakkour. I could not believe my eyes. THIS was what I had been looking for all along! A way to study the model with more than acceptable image quality, professionally and artistically exquisite poses and models, and most of all CONSISTENCY. Consistency is the key. Without a place to gain access to a live model, photos have been until now the only alternative. But Mr. Chakkour has raised the bar, giving full 360 degree rotation around the model in a variety of interesting and challenging poses. Also key is the tastefully done lighting, setting the mood for each pose and allowing clear definition of the forms. This is an incredible resource for anyone wanting to study the figure in depth. You may find, however, that the small viewing window is difficult to handle when trying to create a larger sketch. This is easily remedied by simply opening up the individual quick time movies in quick time by exploring the cd from "my computer" (on your desktop). You can then scale the window to whatever size you wish. Even on a 19" monitor with 1280x1024 resolution, the smoothness and quality of the image is retained with more than admirable quality.
I hope you all find this helpful. I know that those who have run into the same roadblocks as I have will find this to be a much needed breakthrough towards furthering their education. ENJOY, and thank you, Mr. Chakkour and Ms. Loewe.