Why the best art books don’t tell you how to draw.

The boldness of this statement isn’t lost on me, but in the last year of studying drawing more intensely, I found that I improved the most with books that don’t tell you how to draw, but how to understand.

Let’s use anatomy as an example. If you go to your local bookshop, search YouTube or even TikTok you’ll find countless books and videos that show you how to draw the human body in “Five easy steps!”.
Spoiler Alert : It’s not that easy and this will only take you so far. Though you’ll have a brief boost of confidence and something to show other people, you’ll only be left with the ability to draw that one static thing on a page again and again and again.

The reason for this is because the author’s of these resources only taught you how to draw this one thing, not to understand it as a whole. You need resources that teach you how to understand, not how to draw.

The greatest improvements I made in drawing the human body were taken when I studied the book “Anatomy For The Artist” by Jeno Barcsay. In it, Jeno Barcsay works their way through the entirety of the human body. They display and describe exactly how the bones work in tandem with each other, how the muscles attach and move the bones around, and eventually how the skin sits on top of everything else. I drew these images again and again while also reading about what each part actually did. By the time I had worked my way through even half of the book I could draw the human body in a multitude of different angles with a greater understanding of what I was drawing.

This applies to everything. You can copy drapery, facial expressions, even basic shapes but if you’re not understanding what they do and how they work, you won’t learn anything.

Study things the hard way and you will re-paid ten fold!