[syntheweave]

I focused on copying sketches from books, versus reading, as a way of training up drawing skills. The one that occupied most of my drawing year was Morpho: Anatomy for Artists. Later on supplemented by Ken Hultgren: The Art of Animal Drawing. The thing about art books is that when studying off of them you extract quite a bit more than just glancing at the page, so one book lasts a very long while.

Morpho is pretty easy to recommend as a way of getting better at human figures; it has a lot of coverage, and while many of the drawings are a bit on the scribbly side, they're easy to follow and show lots of poses and perspectives. The Hultgren book, OTOH, is definitely a tough one to study from - lots of detailed ink work with hatch lines flung all over, shrunk down to cram them five to a page, and an uneven grabbag of topics(half of the book is horses, which are used to show animation, construction, various phases of sketching, and cartooning - nothing gets a very detailed anatomy treatment or a lot of structure). Working through it was a bit like reverse-engineering, but at the halfway point, I find the exercise worth the effort.