Getting Through Mattesi's Anatomy Book Without Losing Your Mind
I picked up the 7th edition of this textbook because my professor said it was the standard reference for upper-level figure drawing courses. It is dense. The plates are detailed, the diagrams are thorough, and the MySearchLab component is either a lifesaver or a waste of time depending on whether your school actually requires you to use it. Most people buy it without knowing what they are getting into. I will walk you through how to actually use it rather than just reading it cover to cover, which almost nobody does effectively. The book is organized around three pillars: skeletal landmarks, muscular volume, and then translating that knowledge into expressive drawing. The early chapters on the skull and ribcage feel like a anatomy Atlas rather than a drawing guide. That is intentional. Mattesi wants you to understand what sits under the skin before you try to capture gesture. The plates that follow show the same structures with increasing amounts of muscular coverage, moving from skeleton to full figure. Each plate includes annotations for origin, insertion, and function of major muscle groups, which is useful if you are actually doing this work and not just copying images for a quick assignment. Here is the thing most students miss. The book is not meant to be read sequentially from page one to the end. The real value comes from pairing specific chapters with live figure sessions. If you are studying the pectoralis major and deltoid interaction, go to those plates, study the construction diagrams, then draw from a live model. The anatomical knowledge sticks when you apply it within twenty-four hours of seeing it on paper. Otherwise you forget half of it before the next critique.
I ran into a specific problem last semester that the book does not clearly address. The myology plates show muscles in idealized, contracted positions that do not reflect what you actually see on most bodies in natural pose. When I tried to render a figure standing in relaxed weight shift, the trapezius and rhomboid areas on the back looked completely wrong compared to the plate. The muscles were drawn as if the scapulae were protracted and the shoulders pulled back. In a natural stance, the scapulae sit slightly rotated and the upper fibers of the trapezius are barely visible. The workaround was to cross-reference the skeletal positioning plate for the same pose, note the scapular angle, then overlay the muscle illustration mentally rather than copying it directly. It took me about two weeks of doing this for every upper back drawing before it became automatic. The MySearchLab component is where the book gets divided opinions. It contains interactive quizzes on anatomical terminology, timed drawing exercises, and video demonstrations of the construction process. The quizzes are adequate for memorizing muscle names and attachment points. The video demos are where it gets useful. Watching Mattesi build a figure from the pectoral girdle outward, showing how the clavicle orientation drives the tilt of the entire shoulder mass, is worth the subscription if your school includes it. I found the auto-graded quizzes too rigid for actual learning though. They test vocabulary recall, not visual translation. Completing them takes roughly twenty minutes per chapter and does not meaningfully improve your drawing ability. Skip the extra credit modules if they do not count toward your grade. A counter-intuitive point that most beginners overlook is the relationship between bone landmarks and surface tension lines. The book covers this in the later chapters but does not emphasize it enough. When you draw a figure, the visible contours are not determined by muscle bellies alone. They are determined by where tendons and ligaments create tension across bony prominences. The acromion process, the iliac crest, the medial malleolus — these points create lines of force that run through soft tissue. Ignoring them makes figures look like they are made of dough. Focusing on them makes the same basic construction look authoritative even at a simplified level. I spent an entire semester going back to the osteology plates specifically to trace these tension lines across different poses, and it changed my work more than any life drawing class did.
Another common pitfall is overworking the muscular detail too early. The book encourages studying individual muscles in isolation, which is valuable. But when you start drawing, you should block in the major volume groups first — the thorax as a whole, the pelvis as a wedge, the limbs as tapered cylinders. The muscular anatomy comes after. Beginners who start shading individual muscle bellies right away produce stiff, overdefined figures that lose gesture entirely. The expressive design portion of the book addresses this directly in the second half, but students often skip ahead to the rendering plates without doing the construction exercises first. That skips the foundation. As for limitations, the book has several. The illustrations are monochromatic and rendered in a very specific style that not every instructor agrees with. Some figures look geometrically precise but lack the organic variation you see in actual human bodies. The pose reference photos included in some editions are from a limited pool and tend to feature young, lean male models, which leaves a gap when you need to study female anatomy or older bodies with different fat distribution and skin drape. The 7th edition added some more diverse figure references, but the core plate collection still skews heavily toward one body type. If you need broader reference, you should supplement with other sources like Bridgman or Loomis for pose variety, and Gray's Anatomy for clinical detail. The print version runs about four hundred pages with most of them being full-page plates. A digital copy from MySearchLab loads slowly on older browsers and the zoom function on the anatomical plates can be unresponsive. I found it faster to print the plates I needed and annotate them directly with colored pencils. That took about ten minutes per session and made the difference between memorizing a muscle name and actually recognizing it in a drawing.
Get the Full Details
If you are buying this for a course, check whether the MySearchLab access code is included separately or bundled. Many sellers list it as included when it is not. The standalone code runs around thirty dollars extra. You do not need it if your professor does not assign the online work. The physical book alone covers everything you need for the studio portion of the class. The plates are detailed enough to work from without the interactive component, and many graduates of figure drawing programs have never touched MySearchLab at all. The book works best when you treat it as a reference rather than a curriculum. Pull the relevant plate for whatever you are drawing that week. Study the construction diagram for five minutes. Draw from life or reference for thirty. Check back against the plate to see where your understanding diverged from the anatomical reality. Repeat. This cycle typically takes about forty-five minutes per session and builds real visual knowledge over a semester. Reading the text passages straight through takes longer and produces less retention.
