Virtual Pose 2: The Ultimate Visual Reference Series for Drawing the Human Figure with CDROM [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Thanks to Mario Chakkour's Virtual Pose series I am able to improve my life drawing skills without having access to live models!

It's a quality product all around, but it's really the CD-ROM that shines. You open up a model to draw, spin him/her into the position you want - and draw! AMAZING. GENIUS. And what a great deal! There are other companies selling inferior product for 10, 15 times as much.

TIP: If you're a beginner to computers, there's a nice interface to help you through and gives you nice music to listen to while you draw... But if you have any computer skills at all, open up ("explore") the CD-ROM and you can double-click the .MOV files and enlarge them to full screen! That's one more massive plus about this product, you're NOT forced to go through a custom interface to view the models unless you choose to.

I highly recommend this product. It is truly rare these days to find such a high-quality product for such an affordable price. Get it now and build your life drawing skills!

- Matthew G. Cox...

In this book/CD set, Chakkour has compiled 34 female poses and 18 male poses, some in color and others in black and white. The model is posed on a "lazy susan" type turning platform, which is turned a few degrees for each still shot. This means that the very good lighting is constant at every angle, allowing for clear veiw of the body's curves and cast shadows. In those poses where the model is extremely "exposed" (legs overhead, for instance), there is very faint, tasteful shading that does nothing to detract from the usefulness of the shot.

Each pose is given one full page of the book, with six views of the pose displayed on the page. The companion CD-ROM (PC/MAC compatible) then displays each pose in nearly seamless 180 degrees. Using the mouse, the user can rotate the model the full 180 degrees, backward and forward.

I have a few very minor quibbles that I hope Chakkour will address in the next volume. First, a top-down view would be extremely valuable for sculpture work, but I can see how setting up the shot may make this unfeasible. Second, some of the poses aren't very dynamic, or the models look stiff and unnatural. Third, in a very few occasions, I've seen the pose change slightly as I rotate the model. That is, an arm or head drops a little more at each turn of the platform, until it's several inches lower than the starting pose.

None of these quibbles are serious deterrents, however, and the book/CD remain my single favorite tool for working at my home studio. Now if I could just figure out how to rotate the model without getting clay on the mouse...

Suggestions/Negatives: The creators of this software should add some classical background drawing music into the program, or scrap the cheezy MIDI music all together. What would be really nice would be a SAVE feature to return quickly to the model, pose, and degree of rotation that you were previously working on. What really irks me about the program is the long startup and shut down times- the producers/authors force you to watch their intro and exit credits & bells and whistles- wouldn't it suffice to only see this during the (one time) installation? A single splash page during startup of the program would suffice- let us artists get on with drawing! Another nice feature would be the ability to import additional models from the producer in the future. Perhaps these suggestions will occur in version 3 or 4 if enough users pester the producer to incorporate them into future versions. More instructional movies than the 4 that come with the program would add to its features.