When drawing a human figure, you are dooming yourself to imperfection. The human eye knows a human from a human-shaped thing. The human eye knows what proportions are normal and which are a sign of illness, mutation, or Lovecraft-ian origins.

The best way to deal with this is to draw from life. Get a model or models, have them pose, draw them there or take lots of reference photos (more common I'd think)... That's not cheap and can be pretty awkward. "Hi, you look like you have a very nice build - would you mind coming over to my place and taking off your clothes for a photo shoot?" *SLAP/PEPPER-SPRAY/PUNCH-THROW*

So I've been building a reference photo collection for a while, which I generally fail to refer to. The photos are either clothed or in 'boring' poses (kinda like the skeleton 'bind' pose a 3d model would have). The lighting is variable. Gathering even these has been a pain - I probably don't need to tell you the kinds of images I had to skip through in order to get this much from the internet.

So a stupid thought occurs to me: there is probably a book I could use. In fact, I can probably find one at the public library!

There wasn't a massive selection, but there was definitely enough variety to choose from. For those whose libraries use the Dewey Decimal system, go to 743.4 (or thereabouts). If you are lucky, you will find the "Virtual Pose" series.

What I liked (Virtual Pose 3):
* Well lit, professional quality photographs.
* Professional quality models in a variety of useful poses.
* Female and male models.
* Samples from a representative variety of angles around a 360 degree rotation of the model.
* Visual table-of-contents which provided a representative thumbnail of each model pose.
* It's a real book. I always work best with real paper to flip through.

What I disliked:
* CDROM was missing (the others had theirs, but 3 had the most interesting variety of poses to me).
* Pictures are a bit too small.
* Some models had their hair down (great if you want to see how hair works, NOT great if you want to see how the neck/shoulders work).

There were far more technical books on offer, but I'm not that technical/professional of an artist. I do not need to see which way the grain of the muscle goes or where the tendons bind to the skeleton. I just want quality images that are not an embarrassment to be looking at when my kids are watching me draw. This book did that for me. I'll definitely look into the others in the series.

They also have a web site ([link]) where you can order their materials in print/digital form. It's worth looking into if you aren't interested in sifting through porn to find your nude references.