My to-read pile of actual books is getting rather smallish. I mean, I still haven't read Water Logic by Laurie Marks, and Amazon assures me that my copy of the newest Dresden Files will get to me in the near(ish) future, but I'm looking for recommendations what to read after that. And since my f-list is much more widely read than me, I thought it can't hurt to ask.

As for what I'm looking for, the most important thing for me to enjoy a book is that there is at least one likable main POV character to identify with. Generally I can't stand books where the hero is a jerk, or you end up hating everybody. I also dislike ambiguous endings. There are exceptions to that, but in general I prefer plots to be resolved when the book ends, unless it's setup for the sequel. Also, I prefer there to actually be a plot with stuff happening rather than all internal and relationship conflicts. And for the plot to make sense and have not too many holes. OTOH I can overlook slightly clunky language (see the above example of the Dresden Files, though the later novels aren't quite as bad as the earlier ones). I guess I'm rather lacking in avantgarde sensibilities...

As for genres, I like sf and fantasy, unless the worldbuilding sucks, but I also like mysteries, though not so much the serial killer genre. Thrillers rarely do anything for me, nor does romance as the main plot. Another of my quirks is that I don't cope well if a ton of characters are introduced in quick succession. I have nothing against an epic scale in principle, if characters are added slowly, but I don't remember names easily, something which results in me being confused a lot with a certain kind of mystery for example, where you'd be introduced to a dozen people over a few pages.

So do you have any suggestions for me?

A couple of weeks ago I borrowed Drawing and Painting Fantasy Beasts by Kevin Walker from my library (or rather the German edition of this), and I found it quite useful and interesting overall. Basically it's just a bunch fantasy creatures drawn as examples, but each creature comes with about four pages of step by step process description of the techniques used, and the different sketches and stages that went into the final work.

Initially I got it because I had never painted with acrylics, but generally found hobby painting books about acrylics my library had rather useless and boring. I mean, it's not that painting with some new medium was like repairing a motorcycle or any of the other things for which you really need either direct instruction or a book rather than just muddling along, and there's only so much variation to the theme of "you put color pigment on a surface" anyway, but this book has a neat introduction section that just lists different techniques with a little picture of how it looks, which makes it easier to try things than unguided trial and error and I'm lazy like that. Also I wanted to do dragons anyway, and this has examples of fantasy art done with acrylic paint (other techniques too) with step-by-step pictures, so that seemed like a good match.

The first part of the introduction is just the usual list of drawing and painting materials, and rather pointless. Frankly I wonder why nearly every such book feels the need to recap materials in a generic manner at the start. I mean, if you pick up a specialized drawing book you are most likely aware that there's a difference between watercolors, gouache, acrylics and oil paint, and that pastel chalk is different from oil pastels and so on. It's not that I haven't picked up some useful general info from skimming these chapters, because every now and then one will mention something I hadn't know of before, but overall I find them superfluous. Still, the list introducing the materials used is only four pages in this book, so it doesn't dwell, and then the introduction gets more specific with the neatly ordered examples of actually using the materials.

The main part is sections with fantasy beasts sorted by regions in which they supposedly live, and realized in a variety of techniques, both traditional and digital, though most involve acrylics or acrylics mixed with other media. I suspect that if you are already really experienced this book won't tell you much new, but since I've only started using acrylic paint it was useful to have illustrated examples like this for achieving different effects and textures, and getting ideas on what to do, though I have only tried a couple so far.

I've scanned a couple of pages to give you an idea of the way the process descriptions and illustrations look like, though obviously if you don't speak German the text of these scans that explain what was done in each step won't do much for you.
( a few example pages behind the cut )

So I got The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards out of the library, because of my vague intention to draw more this year, and look for exercise ideas. Well, actually I got the German translation which doesn't have anything about brain sides in the title (and I wouldn't have borrowed it if it had, frankly).

Anyway, my overall impression can be summed up as: "Wow, that's a lot of pseudo-scientific 'wawawa wawa' (you know, like the adults go in the Peanuts?) for a couple of simple drawing exercises." Seriously, I skipped most of the endless and idiotic "brain modes" talk (or whatever it's called in the original) about supposedly "tricking" your brain into something to browse for the actual drawing stuff, and it still grated on me.

Some of the exercises sounded okay for drawing practice, but you could have probably cut about 200 pages of mumbo-jumbo from the total 300 pages without loosing any significant drawing content.

The memes where people list what books they've read the past year always end up really pathetic looking for me, because the bulk of my reading is fanfic, not actual books. So there's never much to show off. This year the handful of dead-tree fiction I've read was:

All nine volumes of the Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher, i.e. Storm Front, Fool Moon, Grave Peril, Death Masks, Blood Rites, Dead Beat, Proven Guilty, and White Night

Empire of Ivory, by Naomi Novik (and I've reread the previous parts, i.e. His Majesty's Dragon, Throne of Jade, and Black Powder War)

Tintenherz, by Cornelia Funke

Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman

The Dispossessed, by Ursula LeGuin

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling

The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell

I've also reread Dune again.

I started reading The Years of Salt and Rice, by Kim Stanley Robinson, but for some reason I put it aside (iirc it started slow? I don't really remember), and then I couldn't extend the time I loaned it from the library because someone else had reserved the book, and so I never finished it.

And I read three SGA tie-in novels, though I'm not sure whether those don't count more as fanfic:
The Chosen, by Sonny Whitelaw and Elizabeth Christensen
Entanglement, by Martha Wells
Exogenesis by Sonny Whitelaw and Elizabeth Christensen

Right now I'm in the middle of Fire Logic, by Laurie J. Marks, so I expect I'll finish that this year as well.

OTOH using my del.icio.us bookmarks, which overwhelmingly are just a log of my fanfic reading (though some are tagged as "to read"), to estimate the number of fanfics I read this year, that comes up to well over a thousand. Okay, so most of those are short stories, but some were awesome novels and novellas. Most recently Judas Doesn't Answer by Auburn (ca. 75,700 words), which is a gripping SGA/SG-1 mystery/suspense story I can definitely rec.

I've finished reading the SGA tie-in novel Exogenesis by Sonny Whitelaw and Elizabeth Christensen, and I mostly liked the action-adventure part, though I keep getting surprised by just how more creepy and morally corrupt the Ancients are in the tie-in novels even compared to the series where they are of somewhat dubious character to begin with. However the strong presence of emotionally damaged woobie!Rodney really wasn't my thing. Also, I continue to find the way the expedition treats the Athosians when the former once again triggered a disaster that affects everybody disturbing.

So, like many other people I spent much of today (well technically yesterday) reading the new Harry Potter book.

( spoilers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows )

After seeing a rec by iamza I've now read Entanglement by marthawells. It's a fast-paced action-adventure set in the second season shortly after Ronon joined the team, with an interesting plot involving Wraith, Ancient tech, and some history of the Ancients leaving Pegasus, and I enjoyed it quite a lot. I think I would have like it even better if Teyla had had more to do (but then I think that of the show a lot as well), but plenty of Sheppard kind of made up for that to me. Anyway, it was fun to read.

I've been reading the series, but I think I missed something in Dead Beat... ( spoilery question )

I've finished reading the SGA tie-in novel The Chosen by Sonny Whitelaw and Elizabeth Christensen, which I had seen recced somewhere on my f-list a while ago (by iamza, I think?). And it was quite fun. It's set shortly after The Storm/The Eye, so it's still the S1 team. I liked the alien civilization they encounter (and which they promptly mess up some more) and the plot with the left-overs from some more or less well meaning Ancient of their usual dubious ethics. ( spoilers for the book... )

---

In unrelated rat news, Krümel is now familiar enough with me that I can let him out of the cage and run around for a bit, but it's exhausting-- unfortunately not so much for him as for me. I hadn't precisely forgotten how fast, lively and curious a baby rat is, but Krümel is on the hyperactive side even for them, and sadly now doesn't have a sibling to keep him occupied. The room is rat-safe as long as I keep an eye on him, meaning that a determined rat possibly can squeeze, climb and chew into non-safe spaces, so I have to keep track of him. While watching him I keep thinking that surely it must have been a while already only to check the clock and see that he has been outside barely ten minutes.

Also Ben is somewhat disgruntled with me. Ever since he outgrew the worst destructive tendencies of his own youth and settled down some (meaning that I can read or watch tv without having to fear he'll dismantle the room) he has been allowed outside basically whenever I've been in the room and awake. But now he has to stay in the cage sometimes while Krümel is allowed outside and he's not too pleased with that. I mean, it's not that he has an overwhelming desire for exercise or anything. While he still runs around a bit, mostly he just likes to sleep on my bed and pillows better than to sleep in his cage, however when he sees me with Krümel, he stares through the cage doors and scrabbles at them woefully as if I were constantly keeping him in a tiny hamster box and never let him see daylight or something.

So I've finished the third book, The Mammoth Hunters, and well... The main characters are all really overwrought, aren't they?

I mean, I can't begin to count the moments one character or the other laments their woe to themselves. It's not that I'm inherently against melodrama, and I can buy some mutual misunderstanding lasting for a bit especially with their cultural differences, but this was ridiculous. And worse, it was boring-- surely showing them despairing two or three times would have sufficed? The only good point was that even all the other characters noticed. It reached the point where I even started to hope for more of the purple prose sex scenes, because then at least briefly the characters wouldn't be wailing woefully about how much the other surely hates them, though unfortunately that started up again very soon every time. OTOH if they hadn't miscommunictated for hundreds of pages they probably would have really had far more sex, so there was an upside.

Obviously there were lots of engaging parts too, that kept me interested, or I wouldn't have stuck with it for over seven hundred pages, but I just wanted to slap them all a lot.

I think I found the book I was looking for in my previous post through persistent tinkering with my google search terms and scanning of the results that came up.

I'm not 100% certain because I can't find a picture of the German edition cover for me to recognize, nor any longer excerpts or detailed summaries for a final confirmation, but the title of the German translation sounds very familiar, the publisher and publishing date fits with my memory, and the brief summaries I have found online fit with what I recall. So I think the feminist historical fantasy novel set in ancient Mesopotamia that I was looking for is The Last Warrior Queen by Mary Mackey. It was first published in 1983. The German title is Kornmond und Dattelwein, published by Fischer in their series "Bibliothek der phantastischen Abenteuer".

Recently bethbethbeth asked about novels "you considered to be important in your development." And while I had no idea what to answer in those three fields, that poll made me think about the first more or less feminist sf and fantasy novels I've read as a girl (which were part of a sf/fantasy box set my brother lent me).

And now I vaguely recall this one fantasy novel that I liked a lot and that made a real impression on me, and I'd like to read it again to see how it holds up (like, if I'd still think of it as feminist for example), but of course I can remember neither the title nor the author. And I tried to google for special edition box sets of sf/fantasy literature from the publisher I thought I recalled for the box set, but had no luck with that. *headdesk*

Anyway, unfortunately I don't remember that much from the book (I know I said it made an impression, and it did, I just still don't remember many details). I read it in German, but I'm nearly certain that it was a translation. It was fantasy, but kind of a historical fantasy or imagined history taking place in ancient Mesopotamia. The main theme as I recall it was kind of a culture clash between matriarchal and patriarchal cultures that met in this area in this imagined past, possibly that one was in the city states the other in the less developed surrounding cultures, or the shift from one paradigm to the other, and IIRC it was shown through the protagonist, a woman, who I think made a journey or something, but I'm not too clear on any details. The only other thing I remember is that the Inanna myth played a significant role somehow, which I remember because that book was the first time I heard of her and looked up some stuff about Sumerian mythology.

If anyone could help me find the novel based on this scarce information I'd be really grateful.

So I'm nearly finished with The Valley of Horses and the sex scenes make me want to spork my eyes. I think fanfic (of both the slash and het kind) has spoiled me with its availability (and normalcy) of at least decent sex scenes. That is, if the story is okay, the sex scenes may not be my thing, or may be gratuitous IMO, but they usually won't make me wish for a spork, so when that happens in original fiction I'm caught unprepared, though the heavy angst probably should have been a warning sign.

After a nearly ridiculous amount of overblown angst and melodrama where both Alya and Jondalar misinterpret the other and think "Oh woe! S/He thinks I'm repulsive!" or "Oh woe! I'm never going to find a mate!" etc. etc. for many, many pages, they finally have sex and it's very-- "purple" really doesn't really encompass it. I would quote, but the sex scene that I couldn't continue reading without posting to my LJ about it has been going on for pages already and is not over yet, and a short quote really wouldn't do it justice.

The book's sex scenes are certainly nowhere near the worst I've read, but still quite bad.

I'm reading Jean M. Auel's Earth's Children series, because I've seen it mentioned quite often, but never read it myself. I am currently in the middle of the second book, and still undecided whether I actually like the series, but it's at least interesting enough to keep me hooked.

Though I admittedly found the racial memory thing in the first book very weird and not appealing. I mean, I would have been okay with it if the book was situated a little more towards the fantasy end of the genre spectrum in other respects, but despite the extreme competence of the heroine, and the horse communication and stuff like that, that makes it fun fiction rather than some documentary reconstruction, this Lamarckian memory thing, with added telepathy and regression into past lives no less, seemed far more "out there" to me than the rest. That could be of course because I have no clue about pre-historic living beyond the vague memories of a couple of weeks when we covered it in history class in fifth grade before moving on to Mesopotamia, and a few museum trips where we looked at stuff from local excavations of old poles and pieces of broken stone stuck in some ex-swamp where local neolithic settlements were. Anyway, at least the mental superpowers seem to feature less in the second one.

Also, I am for sure learning a lot of English words I never encountered before, mostly tons of animal and plant species as well as tool names. Now I know that a "Stichel" is called "burin", and that's even a tool I have actually seen and used myself before (though I doubt the steel one I used in wood working class looked much like whatever stone thing they had). One thing that is strange is that I keep looking up the plant and animal names, even though especially with plants it's not as if I have much of an idea what the plant looks like after knowing its German name either. Still for some bizarre reason it is a much less nagging unknown once when I looked up for example that "elecampane" is "echter Alant", that "henbane" is "Bilsenkraut" or that an "dovekie" is a "Krabbentaucher", even though it's not as if I associate actual images or knowledge with either name. It is somewhat weird and ridiculous, but I can't seen to suppress the urge.

I've just finished reading The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and enjoyed it quite a lot. It was closer to pure romance than I normally read in original fiction (so much of the fanfic I read is romance that I usually look for other stuff when I do read something else). There isn't happening much besides the love story between Clare and Henry, but Henry's involuntary time travel episodes throw in enough twists to make it interesting. The way time travel was handled in the story also was cool and unusual: I don't think I've seen involuntary time travel as a result of a genetic disorder before. And I was pleasantly surprised that the story managed to be not confusing, which I had expected with fragmented nature of their timelines.

I was thrown a bit though by some of the German, in particular the "Und so wiete." occurring several times which I guess was supposed to be "Und so weiter." but I couldn't figure out whether that was intentional and supposed to signify something (like a non-standard dialect or whatever) or just a persistent spelling error. There was at least one other place where I was thrown out by misspelled German, but that error was at least not repeated, so I figured it was just a typo. Also I didn't get why at one point Clare's friend, who's supposedly knowledgeable about computers, seemed to imply that she wrote viruses in HTML.

Like just now I am reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, because I had seen it recced a lot. But... so far (I'm only on page 344 of its slightly over 1000 pages) I'm kind of underwhelmed.

It hasn't really hooked me, a sure sign for that being that I read it mostly on public transport, whereas if I'm really engaged with a book I usually bother to take it out of my bag and continue reading it at home rather than leaving it. I still don't like any of the characters. I realize that that's probably intentional, but while the book is kind of interesting with its worldbuilding I'm starting to ask myself whether I really want to spend several hundreds of pages more with characters I dislike. Also, I find the whole excessive footnote thing kind of jarring. If it was just brief footnotes it would be different maybe, but some are four full pages long.

Getting facial expressions, especially more subtle ones right, drawing them so that they are immediately recognizable as exactly what you want is really hard. There's a couple of reasons for that, for example that we are very well trained to read facial expressions and the slightest changes will make an immediately recognizable difference, while at the same time the subtle clues in faces (things beyond the smile/frown line of the mouth and perhaps eyebrow position) aren't something one is all that aware of. Also, not all "stages" of facial movements are equally recognizable, that is, sometimes facial expressions without more context clues like body language don't look like much of anything, so you have to "freeze" the right moment for a drawing. I mean, if you have a series of photos showing a laugh some might just as well look like someone crying and not a recognizable happy crying either. OTOH if you exaggerate too much it will look fake and ridiculous, even in comic-like drawings.

So a lot of the time, at least for me, it's trial and error, like, I have a vague idea what the face would look like, and then if I'm lucky I manage at some point an expression that looks right. Sadly by that point it's likely to be one smudged pencil line in a whole bunch of former attempts that finally makes it look good, and then when I try to trace it in a clean copy using a lightbox or clean it with the computer, or ink it...the expression suddenly is lost again.

Anyway, so I wanted to know more and have a systematic approach as a reference for expressions, and Gary Faigin's The Artist's Complete Guide to Facial Expression does exactly that. I haven't fully read through all the sections yet, but what I have read so far is really helpful, because the illustrations point out step by step which part of the face changes, which muscles do what, analyzes failed and successful examples of artistic representations of emotion and explains why one failed, while the other invokes true emotion, and there's lots of attention to detail. Like what exactly makes the difference in lowered upper eyelids between a lowered gaze, and varying degrees of sleepyness. Or like how you can make eyes look in the distance, look at something nearer, or into an inattentive "inward gaze". Or like explanations how age affects the face and details of expressions.

The book has three main parts: The Structure of the Head, The Muscles of Expression, and the Six Basic Expressions. The first part briefly recaps the proportions of the head, the bones in the skull and how those reflect in the facial planes, and how to construct facial features. That section had mostly things that I already knew, and that I guess most people who have had a portraiture lesson in high school, or read a decent book on drawing humans will also know, but he's clearer than many others with his descriptions and explanations, and I haven't seen some effects of age explained quite as clearly before, either.

The second part, The Muscles of Expressions, lists eleven key muscles of facial expression and then examines what each muscle does to the face separately, as this are the elements he comes back to later when the full expressions are analyzed. The sections look at a muscle group, first showing it in a drawing of a skull so you can see where it attaches, then show it overlaid on an actual face (like here for the sneering muscle), and then show it in action, i.e. first how the face looks with the muscle relaxed, then how it creates expression, in different degrees of contraction. What I found helpful is that it also shows this from different angles, like not just how a frontal frown looks like, but also how it looks from the side (to see this for the sneering muscle look here, here, here and here). And it's really detailed, for example the section of the muscles of the eye and brow is 24 pages, the one explaining the mouth 36 pages (also covering different neutral/resting looks these features have in different people).

The third part, making up more than half of the book, finally covers complete facial expressions, those are sorted into six basic expressions, which are then further divided. He intentionally leaves out expressions that he calls "subjective and circumstantial" because showing the face only people ask to name the emotion in photographs won't agree what it show. Examples Faigin gives for this are greed, vanity, shyness, jealousy, pity, disappointment, remorse, suspicion, stupidity... because the face without any body language (or other context) will be ambiguous. He calls those "circumstantial expressions".

Anyway, the basic ones he distinguishes are sadness, anger, joy, fear, disgust and surprise. He then covers variants, and degrees to each of those. For sadness he distinguishes: crying with open and closed mouth, nearly crying and suppressed sadness (I found it particularly interesting how the tight lip stifling an emotion looks slightly different for tight-lipped anger, a suppressed smile and suppressed sadness, I wasn't aware of that difference), then the pout, and sad expressions involving only the eyes with a neutral mouth (sad smiles are covered later in the "complex smiles" section).

Anger is grouped into: rage (with different versions of angry shouting mouth, and clenched teeth and snarl), anger with compressed lips, anger with angry eyes, but not-angry mouths, lesser angry expressions that then come across as stern and intense. I found it really interesting when he pointed out how the widening of the eyes combined with the angry eyebrows causes the shape of the visible white in the eye to change into an distinct shape so that we can recognize anger just from that, and also the degrees of the angry glare that make eyes go from neutral, to just intense to truly angry.

For joy he covers laughing, overjoyed, open mouthed smile, then varying degrees down to the slight smile, stifled smile and stifled laugh, complex smiles , i.e. mostly those having different eyebrows than pure smiles (happy/sad, eager, ingratiating, sly, debauched, closed eye), and stresses the importance of making eyes and mouth match to express joy, because otherwise you get a fake smile or forced laugh. I found the eye details pointed out helpful too.

Fear is covered from most intense through least intense, i.e. terror, very frightened, frightened and worried. Disgust likewise, from extreme physical disgust with retching, to physical repulsion, mild disgust, and finally disdain. Surprise is covered last and has fewer variants, just open mouthed/slack-jawed, the mouth forming an O, open-mouthed but joyful, and merely in the brows.

Finally he concludes with a table showing all covered emotions and the involved muscles and signature wrinkles in brief (this is an example page from that table), and in that section also gives a tabular overview of expressions of physical not emotional states, like pain, exertion, yawning, drowsiness and such.

It's a very cool book. My only quibble with it is that the green overlaid color is on some pages slightly out of alignment in my copy, as you can see in some of the scan. It's only a few millimeters but that kind of printing fault shouldn't happen in an art book. It's nowhere bad enough to impede usefulness or legibility, though.

Anyway, I'm really pleased with this book and I hope the example scans give an impression of why it's worth buying.

Remember a while ago back when I posted this scan of a kind of terrifying smiling Wolverine that was an example in the Wizard How to Draw: Heroic Anatomy book? Well, back when I first leafed through the book I was also pissed off at the chapters on drawing women (at some chapters more than others), but I couldn't quite figure out what exactly annoyed me so much, since it wasn't just straightforward sexism bothered me.

Not that that is absent, but it is a Wizard publication, and those chapters are explaining how to draw conventionally "beautiful" and "attractive" women for comic books, so it's not like I expected much in the way of feminist consciousness or anything. The mere fact that there are four chapters in the anatomy section on drawing women that have no equivalent for drawing men in their book is quite telling. The chapters in question are "Women" (by Joe Linsner), "Sultry Women" (by Adam Hughes), "Realistic Women" (by Terry Moore) and "Sex Appeal" (by Michael Turner). And yes, the one on sex appeal doesn't mention men at all. There's another one called "Superheroic Women" but there's also a chapter "Superheroic Men". Since the book is actually not that bad with including women as examples in the other chapters dealing with "regular" anatomy (hand, feet, faces, muscles, etc) compared to some other drawing books I've seen (like I mentioned in an earlier entry), it's unsurprising that the "special" chapters deal with women as sex objects.

I found the presentation somewhat bizarre in places, because clearly a lot of those sections were intended to come across as a bit self-mocking, only, well... I think an example will show what I mean. Here's a page from the chapter "Women" with the subsection for some reason called "The Triple Threat" (threat? wtf?!?), pointing out that main areas of interest in the blunt approach to creating attractiveness (from the heterosexual male POV) would be breasts, ass (they printed "butt" of course *eyeroll*) and legs. Duh. Who would have thought. I mean, that paragraph doesn't even explain anything about drawing any of these, so why include this? Actually Linsner explains at the beginning of the chapter that he's just going to explain what features he finds attractive in women, and is not actually going to talk about, you know, drawing these features. He continues for two more pages in a similar way, pointing out that eyes, hands, lips and hips were also attractive, and at the end I was mostly "whatever", but not all that aggravated.

That changed with the next chapter "Sultry Women", in particular with this page. The point this is trying to make about breast size and that larger breasts won't necessarily look better is fair enough, however it could have been done in a less offensive manner, that doesn't point to the example that fat women also have large breasts and of course "fat=ugly" is assumed as a given. I mean, in his chapter Terry Moore managed to draw examples that exaggerate the same problem (unrealistic breasts) along with some others, like here and here, and show how it doesn't really look good to draw women this way, without being that offensive.

But I realized that what aggravated me so much wasn't just the "fat is obviously ugly" aspect of that picture. While I'm not into the anorexic look and also think that what looks good in terms of weight, build, curves... whatever, depends a lot on the individual woman (or man), I'm not above conventional ideas of attractiveness either. I think what got to me is that she's a) eating and from the litter around her and the fact that it's not like she's sitting down for a meal it seems implied that she does so constantly (going with the cliche that fat people are fat because they have no self-control etc) and b) she's not even enjoying to eat, but looks very much unhappy. Combine that with the image that mocked the fanboy on the earlier page from Linsner's chapter which used "fat" among other things to evoke the impression of "ungroomed" and "unattractive" (though OTOH it also shows definite similarities with the artist, except for the hair-length, so there's the element of irony again), and you get this thread that fat is not just ugly, but comes with undesirable personality traits as well. Meh.

Anyway, this got me thinking about how bodies in general are depicted in drawing books, and I think often too little attention is paid to how different bodies look, when bodies are conceptualized in books on drawing humans. I mean, the obvious thing every drawing book will tell you is to study humans, draw from life, carry a sketchbook with you, blablablah, which is of course as true as it is supremely unhelpful. Nobody needs a book to know that to draw and study real people is good practice, OTOH drawing from life has also limitations, which is most likely the reason why you got the drawing book in the first place. Maybe the sketches from RL just won't turn out right and you want to figure out what you're doing wrong, or maybe you're at at a point when you need to "construct" and arrange a bunch of humans without direct reference to get the picture you want with reasonable effort. (Obviously you could try to convince a friend to crouch and jump with a fake sword while you study this or take pictures with a motion sensitive camera from exactly the angle you want, but you probably end up quickly with friends who get suspicious when you invite them over for "dinner".)

Depending on the focus of the drawing book it will more about the first or the second scenario, but in any case they usually break down humans in easier shapes, point out underlying functions, give a general sense of proportions, the usual, and as a part of that a more or less "generic human" tends to figure rather prominently in this. and unsurprisingly that "generic" human is usually a young(ish), white man, though young, white women appear too, and they are usually drawn in a way that is considered "well-proportioned" at the time, which fluctuates a bit, e.g in Georg Bridgeman's books (written in the first half of the 20th century) women are quite likely to have bellies that curve slightly outward, and are generally curvy (they'd probably count as "plump" these days).

Anyway, obviously when you look at this from a critical viewpoint this set-up is problematic to say the least, though considering the publication date of a lot of the "classics" I have in mind it's not surprising, but if you just want to use the book it's not that bothersome as long as your main "construction problem" is to arrage a body in space. A great example for this is Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Figure Drawing, which I own in a German edition (I don't think there are significant differences to the English one, but I'm not certain) and which is basically 170 pages explaining techniques how to arrange this "generic" human (obviously he's nude though not with detailed genitals, still some might consider the scans NWS) in space with the help of geometric constructions/visualizations like this one (it's kind of like virtually moving a ken doll). A couple of times a woman's body makes an appearance (while he has no distinctive face, she doesn't get a head at all in the bunch of drawings explaining how structures with women are different, mostly in the section on reclining poses, some in the sitting poses, none in the action poses...), but it's a negligible number of drawings compared to the male ones.

I actually like Hogarth's book quite a bit, like IMO he explains foreshortening really well, he explains how to draw humans from unusual perspectives, how you can draw human motion, and a bunch of other stuff that causes this book to be so widely recced. What it falls short on is the step to turn the ken doll you arranged in space into an actual human being with a distinct body. To be fair, I don't think it's the topic of the book, and I've never actually read all the text beyond that what was necessary to make sense of the constructions, so I have no idea whether or not he points out the issues of making bodies real.

A lot of drawing books seem to assume that that step, to make the human distinct isn't one that benefits from the same "constructionist" approach as the spatial arrangement, and that just observing enough different humans will work well enough to make the underlying principles clear. However, I found it rather helpful to have the ways in which bodies gain individuality laid out to me, because while that won't cover everybody either, it helps to make sense of the common variations. E.g. I wasn't aware that the area between the shoulderblades was all that noticeable in terms of body fat before reading this page (from Figure Drawing Without a Model by Ron Tiner).

OTOH with that book I frequently ran into the problem that rather dubious (or at least highly controversial) "scientific" classification systems from the 19th/early 20th century were turned into artistic tools without any reflection, for example the craniometry with its cephalic index (I didn't scan the pages applying those). I mean, it didn't bother me to read a chapter explaining about height/width characteristics of the human face and if he wants to use the terms "dolichoc