Draw Real Hands! (Discover Drawing Series)

Average customer rating:

didn't dissapoint

Draw real hands? Not really...

Lee Hammond delivers...

Very good book

Excellent Work

Draw Real Hands! (Discover Drawing Series)
Lee Hammond
Manufacturer: North Light Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Instructional & How-To | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
Drawing | Instructional & How-To | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
Figure Drawing | Instructional & How-To | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
General | Drawing | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
General | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
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Draw Real People! (Discover Drawing Series)

Draw Real Animals! (Discover Drawing Series)

Lee Hammond's Big Book of Drawing

How to Draw Lifelike Portraits from Photographs

Drawing Hands and Feet: Form, Proportions, Gestures and Actions (The Art of Drawing series)

ASIN: 0891348174

Customer Reviews:

didn't dissapoint.......2006-01-12

I just got this book and I'm very glad I did. I think it's perfect that she covers shading, because that's what makes the hands look "real". You add shading to a circle and it becomes a sphere, an object that has substance. I used to draw hands and they looked like crap. After reading and studying this book, I've gone back to my old crappy drawings of hands and apply the correct shading and they actually look pretty good now.

Draw real hands? Not really..........2005-06-17

The title of this book should be "Do realistic shadding with a pencil". While the images shown are well drawn, and the artist certainly has talent, most of the instruction in the book concerns shading the hands realisticly, rather than actually telling you how to draw them. Drawing hands by using the references provided in the book or from life is easy. As is drawing just about anything from reference. However, that's not being able to draw real hands. That's being able to copy real hands. The book does not cover the proportions of the hand very well at all, and without that you will still have trouble drawing hands in any position without reference. The book also doesn't discuss the underlying skeletal structure or muscle groups very well at all, and that lack of information also makes it hard to draw the hand in any position without reference.

In short, if you want to know how to do realistic shading with a pencil and some other tools, this book is ok. If you want to really learn how to draw hands I recommend you read the 10 or so pages on hands found in The Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist. You'll find more truly useful information there than you will in the 79 pages of this book.

Lee Hammond delivers..........2004-06-29

Lee Hammond delivers! I get a kick out of this, because I've been able to give two FIVE STAR ratings today, and this is one of them. "DRAW REAL HANDS" is a humbly presented work of the draftman's realm.

Hammond is straight-forward, accomplished instruction, and genuinely provides a valuable service to those looking for good book instruction. I take such a delight in instructors like Hammond, who doesn't combine coy wording or psycho-babble in the title. He's offering basic art instruction, and that's exactly what he delivers, with a thorough coverage of the specific subject and at a reasonable price.

And Hammond doesn't drone on with wordy text or promise "complete guide to" ..."complete course in drawing"... or use words like "ultimate" or "drawing on the right side of everyone's wallet" etc. He's an OKAY drawing author by me. Lee Hammond promises HANDS; Lee Hammond delivers HANDS.

Maybe good art instruction is just that simple. Throw in a little love and encouragement, and watch'em grow.
Congratulations Mr. Hammond, on a good book.

Very good book.......2002-01-06

If anyone has trouble drawing hands, I definitely would suggest this book. My older sister, (a very good artist, by the way) purchased it at amazon.com used. While she thinks a very few of the hand's positions look unnatural, she is impressed with the book.I've had trouble with hands, so I'm eager to dive into this book. Her other books have always helped me. By the way, on reason some people have trouble with Lee Hammond's techniques are simply because they don't buy the supplies she lists! These supplies are very important towards improving your work. The money will be worth it. In fact, I would suggest ALL of Lee Hammond's books. I've seen most of them. If you interested in drawing people, I would suggest How to Draw Life-like Portraits from Photographs the most of all her people books. It covers more than her other book, has everything. The results are amazing. And the techniques you learn here will help you in all future drawing!!!

Excellent Work.......2001-12-28

I have found books by Lee Hammond to be second only to Betty Edwards. I have learned many techniques to take my work from rough outline to photo quality. This book has covered my most troublesome area of drawing and improved my results substantially. More power to Lee. I recommend it as essential reading for all budding artists. I wish I had it twelve months ago.

Book Description

Since the mid-1930s, Helen Levitt has photographed life on the streets of New York, capturing the pulse of the city at moments when sidewalk life becomes an urban portrait. Crosstown is the most comprehensive monograph devoted to this master photographer. In pioneering pictures of 1930s and 1940s Harlem, an innovative color series completed in 1960, and black-and-white images from the 1980s and 1990s, the book reveals the changes in New York street culture as well as the evolution of Levitt's photographic eye.

Customer Reviews:

Manhattan Images Must Have.......2002-04-26

This is my latest favorite photography book. I have a large collection that includes many with Manhattan as subject. The images captured by Levitt are stunning and the binding of the book itself is wonderful.

Taking Time To Look Around.......2002-03-24

Helen Levitt is not one of those New Yorkers who look neither to the left or right as they travel the streets of the city. This is a book about life. The neighborhoods she shoots are generally poor ones, yet we see people that are involved; people who are actively engaged in life even when they seem to be doing nothing. Her subjects -often children- play, they love, they communicate, they are lost in thought, and occasionally are sleeping.

A fine sense of humor permeates many of the scenes. Some subjects are caught in contorted, puzzling positions. We see the incongruous position of objects: an old 33rpm record in the street; a pair of shoes sitting by themselves on a sidewalk; three chickens wandering around a decrepit room -where did they come from? A mother's head is buried in the bottom of a baby buggy while the tyke yelps with joy. A dog is caught in the act of mistaking his owner's leg for a fire hydrant while she talks to a friend.

In general HL catches the warm side of humanity. Only a couple of pictures look like they were taken from a file of Jacob Riis (a 19th century photographer of New York tenement life). There was one particularly sad shot of a woman and her three children sitting on their front steps. They are obviously impoverished. The two youngest children seem quite content, but the mother seems weighed down with her life, and in the teen-age daughter we see the beginning of lost hopes.

This book is a must for anyone interested in street photography. It will take you a long time to get through this book as each photograph will hold your attention for some time.

A classic book of street photography.......2002-02-17

Helen Levitt's name is less well known than some of her images of New York street life. Perhaps that is the way she would wish it since she seems to have never sought fame. The book is as reticient as she and there is little commentary, but in truth little is necessary though I would love to know more about her and her work. This is a beautifully printed, organized and designed book and it was a pleasure to spend hours looking at the photographs. Often it was difficult to turn the page because each image is so compelling and resonates on many different levels. In a way, they are the perfect street images; they have the look of a snapshot but are so much more than that. Though they are all of New York they have a universal quality and speak about the truth of people's lives in a profound way. I admired the formal qualities of the photographs but what resonates most is the deep humanity of what she does, what she sees and records. It sometimes seems to me that photographers, in their quest for a good images,treats subjects with a level of distain and distance that is uncomfortable and ultimately manipulative. Crosstown is nothing like that and even when the photos are funny, and several are, they are funny in a very human way. There is nothing saccharine or trite in her work either and she has a great gift of photographing children without slipping into cuteness. I am a photographer and I treasure this book. I would certainly recommend it to others interested in photography, but I thinks its' appeal extends to anyone interested in the human condition and how we relate to one another.

Great Book.......2002-02-14

This book has a number of unique photographs. Ms Levitt with many of these wonderful pictures,leaves you wondering what happened before or just after the picture was taken.
You can I believe see some connection to the style of Cartier Bresson with whom I understand she spent some time working.
I recommend the book.

Don't miss it.......2001-12-09

If you admire the warmth and humanity of Helen Levitt's endearing photographs of New Yorkers, don't miss this book. The selection of photographs is superb and the printing and binding quality are first rate. This book could go out of print soon, from which time its value will grow quickly.

Average customer rating:

New York's Best Photographer

Here and There

Manufacturer: powerHouse Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Collections, Catalogues & Exhibitions | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 1576871657

Book Description

Foreword by Adam Gopnik. Levitt's new collection of personally-selected images, Here and There, a charming monograph featuring over ninety never-before-published photographs, including portraits of her friends James Agee and Walker Evans. The recently discovered photographs featured in Here And There represent Levitt's own favorite images selected from her immense private collection. Shot over seven decades, Here And There reveals Levitt's acute sense of how cosmetically street life has changed - and how substantially it has remained the same. The sheer determination of this inimitable photographer to walk the streets of her beloved city for this length of time and take pictures of what she sees reaffirms her unofficial status as New York City's visual poet laureate.

Customer Reviews:

New York's Best Photographer.......2004-03-27

New York's Photographer

Helen Levitt, born in Brooklyn in 1913, took up photography when she found she couldn't draw. For seventy years. she took her cameras down the New York streets where tourists seldom wander. She photographed janitors, children, pushcarts, subway riders, and dogs.

Crosstown (Powerhouse Books, 192 pages, $75), a collection of many of her best pictures, became an instant classic when it was published in 2001. Now her publisher has followed up with the less imposing, less expensive, but equally remarkable Here and There (Powerhouse Books,120 pages, $40). It's a selection of 120 black-and-white photographs, also taken mostly in New York City. The book is graced with an especially perceptive foreword by New Yorker critic Adam Gopnik.

Yorkville. Spanish Harlem. The Lower East Side. Levitt's people abide in a landscape without foliage: a desert of sidewalks, store fronts, and empty lots. Their lives slide by unnoticed, unpraised. Yet their faces are maps of emotional nuance. There's half a boy and half a man under that fedora. You would not want to mess with that moving man in the middle of the trio. Note the nearly penitent posture on that big guy in his undershirt getting the word from that tiny little dog.

There is not a single picture here that has much of real interest "going on." Yet everything's going on, all around, all the time, here and there. Levitt possesses that rarest of gifts, an original temperament. The artist who look these pictures knows the world will always be full of dead cats and kids bawling their eyes out. She also knows how gratifying its daily illuminations can be.

Levitt requires neither celebrity nor flamboyance (much less decadence) to give us portraits as emotionally complex as drawings by Durer or Rembrandt. In this sense, she is the quiet opposite of every superstar New York photographer from Avedon to Warhol.

And as anyone who has lived there knows, these are authentic New Yorkers. They may be invisible to the crowds uptown, but what pride there is in that profile, what resignation sulks in those eyes, what mischief electrifies that grin.

It's as though each of Levitt's pictures had its own wire that plugged directly into a tiny but precise aspect of the human condition. Her skill with her Leica is such that we are made to stand in her sensible shoes, to see through her comprehending eyes. And so we are transported to a spot in the sidewalk across from a building that was torn down forty years ago. And it's more real than anything in Vanity Fair.

Levitt's pictures send a message to serious photographers. "You don't have to get outside your own life," they assure us. "All the material you can handle is right down the street."

Book Description

"At least a dozen of Helen Levitt's photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work that I know. In their general quality and coherence, moreover, the photographs as a whole body, as a book, seem to me to combine into a unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing, and in a gently and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work." (James Agee) World-renowned for her iconic black-and-white street photographs, New York City's visual poet laureate Helen Levitt also possesses a little-known archive of color work, which has been collected for the first time in Slide Show, her third powerHouse Books monograph. In 1959, and again in 1960, Helen Levitt received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation to photograph in color on the streets of New York, where she had photographed two decades earlier in black-and-white. But tragically, the best of these pioneering color pictures were stolen from her apartment in 1970 and she had to start over again. In 1974 the new work was shown as a continuous slide projection at New York's Museum of Modern Art—an early example of a slide show presentation by a museum and one of the first exhibitions of serious color photography anywhere in the world. Slide Show presents more than one hundred photographs—including eight surviving images from the 1959-60 series—more than half of which have never been exhibited or published before. This impressive monograph is a worthy successor to her magnum opus, Crosstown (powerHouse, 2001), which included the largest collection of her color pictures to date, and to her more intimate volume of black-and-white work, Here and There (powerHouse, 2004), which presented more than eighty "unknown" Levitts taken over six decades.

Customer Reviews:

Disappointing Printing.......2006-12-31

I'm a big fan of Helen Levitt's work & I would love to give this book a 5 star review. Unfortunately her excellent photography is not presented well due to a poor print job. It seems that something went wrong in the scanning or pre press phase. All the photos are too light & the colours are washed out. This is not how Kodachrome should look. Some of the same images are printed in the German book titled 'Helen Levitt' & the difference is significant. The photos in the German book are much more accurate. Unfortunately this publication is no longer in print & hard to come by.

I already knew that this book 'Slide Show' had poor reproductions as I had a chance to view a copy in the library. I bought it anyway because it is the only way to see some of her photos. I can't think what went wrong as Powerhouse seems to be a quality publisher & I own other photography books by them where the printing is fine.

The least glamorous photos of New York you are ever likely to see.......2006-11-07

The photos in this collection portray working people and poor people, people who are poorly dressed, people without air conditioning on hot summer days, people with ugly pets. The collection is oddly timeless; many photographs of New York can be dated to within a few years by looking at store awnings and, clothing styles, and haircuts, but not these. The people whom Levitt photographed are wearing clothing that was shapeless, ugly, and impossible to date in 1960, 1970, or 1980. With the exception of a couple of photos that show movie theater marquees in the background, nothing here can be dated.

The photos are all the more remarkable because they flatter nobody. Did people give permission to be photographed, knowing how they would look? Had they given up long ago?

Some of the photos give their subjects dignity, but not all. The book is sometimes cruel, sometimes funny.

As an aside, I'd love to know where these photos were taken. Some look like East Harlem, but not a single photo shows a street sign, and I can't identify any of the stores.

America's Greatest Woman Photographer.......2006-05-08

This collection of Helen Levitt's brilliant color photographs is a treasure. I grew up in the city, and looking through this book, I was immediately transported back to the sights, smells, sounds and feelings of my childhood. These sensitive street scenes are wonderful social documents and pure poetry.

Average customer rating:

Helen Levitt: Mexico City
James Oles
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Collections, Catalogues & Exhibitions | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Photo Essays | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Mexico | Americas | History | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0393045498

Amazon.com

American photographer Helen Levitt--renowned for her honest, compelling shots of early industrial New York City--spent a good part of 1941 photographing Mexico City. The slices of life depicted in this collection of her work present a vision of a city becoming. Levitt focuses her acutely urban sensibilities on a city whose increased industrialization after World War Two brought tremendous social and economic change. Factories in central urban areas required people to leave rural homes for regular work and promises of "progress." Levitt's photographs frankly depict the juxtaposed traditions of rural life and industry for this new working class: women in homespun garments board trains, poor children dry machine-made clothes on cacti, and shawl-wrapped peasants carry daily newspapers. These beautifully printed images shed visionary light on modern Mexico City.

Book Description

Esteemed American photographer Helen Levitt lived in Mexico City in 1941 and photographed the city's rapid urbanization and traditional ways of life, then struggling to coexist. Levitt's astute vision captured a city and its inhabitants on the cusp of modernity, with neither sentimentalism nor romanticism. Working almost exclusively in urban and semi-urban areas of Mexico City, she confronted directly the conflicts and juxtapositions that provided inescapable evidence of Mexico's presence in the modern world, and she did so with compelling force and dry wit. These images show street scenes in Chapultepec Park and other distinctly urban zones, as well as the working-class neighborhoods then on the periphery of the city. Over half a century later, her photographs unlock the past, helping to decipher the sprawling city of today. Most of these images have never before been exhibited or published.

Book Description

Description: "The Eye Club," unofficially founded around 1975, was the nickname given to the loose conglomeration of individuals who found themselves among the first new collectors of photography. Operating purely on instinct and the love of seeing, these few dozen people (including Sam Wagstaff, Andre Jammes and other now-legendary collectors) shared a distaste for established pantheons and veered instead toward the lesser-known, the anonymous, the outr or any photograph emanating sparks of electricity. Photography was their perfect vehicle and they were startled to find themselves in so much unchartered territory. The nearly 100 surprising pictures in The Eye Club have been assembled in a similar spirit of adventure. Photography persists as an unruly medium, and this book is comprised of an unruly group of photographs, brought together in the open-eyed spirit of the Eye Club to mark the 25th anniversary of San Francisco's esteemed Fraenkel Gallery. Printed with exceptional fidelity to the original prints, this publication assembles little-known images by some of the most important artists in the history of photography, chosen with an eye toward the unexpected and including as-yet-unpublished work by Diane Arbus, Chuck Close, Constantin Brancusi, Robert Adams, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Nan Goldin, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Andy Warhol, among many others. A significant number of works by "Photographer Unknown" are included among gems by Richard Avedon, Nadar, Andreas Gursky, Lee Friedlander, Alfred Stieglitz, Adam Fuss, Helen Levitt, Paul Outerbridge and Robert Frank. The combination is fresh and surprising.

Helen Levitt: The Corcoran Gallery of Art

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Helen Levitt: The Corcoran Gallery of Art

Manufacturer: Corcoran Gallery of Art
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000QSJLF6

IN THE STREET: CHALK DRAWINGS AND MESSAGES, NEW YORK CITY, 1938-1948. With an essay by Robert Coles

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IN THE STREET: CHALK DRAWINGS AND MESSAGES, NEW YORK CITY, 1938-1948. With an essay by Robert Coles
Helen (photographer). Levitt
Manufacturer: Duke Univ. Press,
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000OWOP0U

Book Description

Now aboard the Ryvius space vessel, the adoptive crew must decide whether boarding the ship has helped their plight or merely exasperated their dire straits. The exciting conclusion is revealed.

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