When students say they've bought this book, I urge them to return it ASAP. The timeless and persuasive beauty of Hogarth's pencil technique blinds people to a critical flaw: He's making this stuff up.



The fact that he uses his own non-standard terminology is not in itself a flaw. But it does highlight the fact that he is proceeding from his own rather idiosyncratic take on things, his hunches and habits, rather than any overview of other books on the subject--much less any reference to reality. He makes up his own language for folds, much as he makes up the anatomy in his more famous book. These books are mostly useless because they only teach you to draw (and talk) like Burne Hogarth.



Don't believe me? Consider the first thing that student artists grasp when they are made to draw folds AS PHYSICAL OBJECTS: folds are continuous raised forms alternating with valleys or plains. But on the cover of this book you can see Hogarth fudging that vital figure-ground relationship like a lazy first-year art student. Look at the dotted arrow closest to the flattened man's right foot (near left edge of cover). The dotted arrow-line is rooted on a line that starts out describing the LEFT side of a roll yet finishes, on the upper surface of the pantleg, defining the RIGHT edge of a roll.



This doesn't occur in reality, not now nor at any time in the history of clothing, yet the same figure-ground confusion is repeated throughout in this drawing, least subtly in the right armpit, where Hogarth is decidedly drawing pretty lines without a thought to what they describe. Which parts are raised folds and which the depressions between? Who knows?



Jack Hamm's classic book Drawing the Head and Figure (Perigee) is infinitely more useful because it's rooted in Hamm's own independent, reality-tested observations rather than Hogarthian fantasia.

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