How to Draw Girls & Women

Each book in the Comic Artist's Photo Reference series includes four models in a variety of poses and several demos showing how professional comic artists used the photos as reference for a finished piece. The books also come with CDs - no rotating 3D models, but there's some extra photos not included in the books and short videos of the models. Being comic artist reference books, they include poses of people flying, shooting, and fighting as well as the more traditional sitting and walking poses.

The photos in the books are great - the perfect combination of dynamic postures and interesting lighting. Several photos show the models in positions where certain small details are important - such as the way a hand is grasping a sword - and these photos include close-up shots to get a better look at the detail. There's also pages full of head shots in which the models are acting out different emotions, which are great practice for drawing faces. You won't be able to draw every emotion known to man out of these books, but you'll certainly be able to get a start on it.

Comic Artist's Photo Reference: Women and Girls includes some great reference photos for learning how to draw women, including several pages of one of the models climbing around a jungle gym and head shots of the models putting on makeup and doing their hair. There's also some cool fight scenes (it has nunchucks! NUNCHUCKS!) and photos of the models dressing or undressing. There's no actual nudity, or even semi-nudity, though, so you can use these books to practice drawing a woman changing clothes without worrying about your four-year-old stumbling over the book (what happens when said four-year-old finds your drawings is an entirely different problem).

When drawing women, it's important to draw everything at the correct sizes - otherwise the whole drawing looks distorted. Note that everyone's body (and their corresponding proportions) is different, but most are fairly close to a certain standard.

From Female Proportions

From How to Draw a Girl's Face