art book reviews

Dragon Girl and Monkey King is Katsuya Terada's artbook for 2014. Terada's a prominent Japanese artist and illustrator who's known for his creative character designs. Over the years, he has released several artbooks and there's something common in them, as in you can tell that he's a tireless sketcher and painter, churning out characters after characters.

The book title is taken from Terada's full-colour manga The Monkey King which is based on The Journey to the West. Volume one and two for The Monkey King were released by publisher Dark Horse.

The Dragon Girl is a character created for this artbook. Terada wanted to juxapose the Monkey King, so he created a metal-winged Dragon Girl. The girl has one good wing and the other is just a wire sticking out of her back, one hand is holding a sword that's made of plants and vines, and she's stepping on what seemed like an alien skull that has a shocked look. That's the imaginative Terada for you.

This is full-colour 200-page hardcover book that's mainly filled with character designs, and it collects the artworks not seen in his earlier artbooks. Other than the Monkey God, Dragon Girl, there are also samurai warriors, Hellboy, Assassin's Creed, Blood: The Last Vampire and many other miscellaneous fantasy characters from Terada's weird imagination.

There are also quite a handful of those erotic women with mechanical gear, with sub-genre into cyberpunk, steampunk, gothic and others. The erotic female pin-up illustrations here are not duplicated in Terada's other book エロ×メカ (Katsuya Terada's Erotic Engineering). Yep, both books are NSFW.

Most artworks look like they are painted but there are also some sketches and digital art. Terada has a textural style created by the paint strokes and oftentimes coarse linework, perhaps from graphite pencils.

Overall, the artworks are very well reproduced in this large artbook. The only negative aspect would be that most artworks are not captioned, except for the few selected pieces where the commentary appears at the back of the book. There's also an interview with Terada at the back that talks about the different projects he has worked on in the past.

This book is a good survey of work that Terada has created over the years. There is only minor duplication of work shown here and in his other artbooks, so it's still a very worthwhile purchase. Recommended to Terada fans.

Dragon Girl and Monkey King: The Art of Katsuya Terada is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN) and Book Depository

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Dark Shepard is a large 160-page hardcover artbook that features predominantly the sci-fi artworks of Fred Gambino.

Gambino started out working in traditional illustration, but now creates mostly digital art. His style, at least in this book, is that of blending 3D renders, photography and digital art.

Dark Shepard is actually a sci-fi genre screenplay written by Gambino. The first portion of the book is devoted to fleshing out that screenplay with accompanying artworks. There are few pages of dialogue for the characters created and then it's followed by artworks of space travel and exploration, with adventures like a spaceship escaping the jaws of a giant alien serpent, exploding moons falling from the sky, scenes of colourful nebulas.

After that are behind the scenes concepts to Dark Shepard, such as photos of the human models, armour rendering, 3D models of mechs and spaceships. Dark Shepard also appears in comic form for a few pages.

The rest of the book collects the commissioned artworks he created for book covers, and the concept art for film, tv and games. He has worked on the Battletech and Mechwarrior book covers, created the landscapes for Escape from Planet Earth, Cartoon Network's Firebreather and has many other sci-fi tech-heavy commissioned artworks as well. The concepts presented, such as the robots and spaceships, are nice but could be stronger in terms of being more distinct. I prefer the environment art.

Much of what's in the book have the look and feel of computer generated visuals because of how the textures, modelling and lighting are handled. The mixed media artworks may not be jarring but one look you will know that it's mixed media, especially for the artworks that are created with photographs and 3D models. That's the style of Gambino and it works well for the book covers and for other work he does. Having said that, I would recommend looking through the pages before buying to see if that's the kind of style that appeals to you.

4 out of 5 stars.

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This book is reviewed by James Tan.

Heinrich Kley was a German artist in the great tradition of ink drawings and The Lost Art of Heinrich Kley, Volume 2: Paintings & Sketches contains enough artworks to please all his admirers - both new and old.

If you do not know who he is, you are in for a treat. Heinrich Kley’s drawings are surreal and dark, and showcase his strange sense of humour. His rich imagination is evident in this book, especially his renderings of anthropomorphic creatures.

His pen and ink drawings have long been a source of inspiration for generations of animators, illustrators and cartoonists; he is unmatched in his pen and ink drawings of bizarre satirical cartoons.
Even Walt Disney was inspired by his works and Fantasia was one of the notable works that was strongly influenced by Heinrich Kley.

There are two volumes in total: all the images are beautifully produced and come together with insightful essays by prominent artists who admired his works.

The Lost Art of Heinrich Kley, Volume 1: Drawings showcases more of his drawings while Volume 2 presents his rarely seen paintings and preparatory sketches - which gives some insight to this influential artist. Both books are in paperback and published by Picture This Press.

Another book on Henrich Kley worth checking out is the The Drawings of Heinrich Kley by Dover which contains numerous spot illustrations of his work and his imaginative universe where elephants ice skate and crocodiles do alpine climbing.

The Lost Art of Heinrich Kley, Volume 2: Paintings & Sketches is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN) and Book Depository

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Akihito Ikeda is a professional special-effects makeup artist and designer who has worked in the film industry for 19 years. He had worked in Japan for 9 years before moving to Los Angeles. Akihito's technical skills are amazing, and so is his sense design and aesthetics.

The work featured is a mixture of sculpture art, and special-effects makeup for actors. Large high resolution photographs are used to enable you to see the minute details in each sculpture. Several angles are shown. Each design is unique and deserves the time it needs for you to slowly marvel at the beauty of the work.

The sculptures, mostly characters, are often a blend of resin, metal and cloth. The colouring, texture and finishing really make them look terrific. It's difficult to explain what I'm seeing except to say that his art has a combination of mystique and fantasy. The last time I was so fascinated by sculptures was looking at Kris Kuksi's book Divination and Delusion.

The latter pages look at the special-effects makeup. It includes characters he created for a Hollywood makeup program, theatre work, runway shows, art festivals, and other events. A few of the examples in the book have also appeared in A Complete Guide to Special Effects Makeup. The fully realised characters after makeup are really beautiful. There's just something more life-like to these characters compared to 3D rendered models.

A few pages of sketches and character concept art are also included in the book.

The last section in the book looks at the process of creating the sculptures and applying makeup to the actors. There are many photos looking at the different steps in the process, and commentary is provided for all. It's insightful to read about the creation process, and to find out the tools, materials and paints used. There's explanation for the sculpting, casting, molding and painting processes, and also a bit on how costumes are created.

This is a fantastic artbook that really showcases the creativity and beauty of Akihito's work. It should be inspiring for those in the same industry.

Highly recommended.

Heart of Art: A Glimpse into the Wondrous World of Special Effects Makeup and Fine Art of Akihito is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN) and Book Depository

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This book is a mixed bag and not in a good way.

The book description says "this book is an in-depth look at costume design and illustration. Showcasing an educational process breaking down the problematic areas of costume design for the film, video game and animation industries".

The thing is, this book is not that in-depth, and it most certainly does not break down the process for costume design. The featured artists just talk about what they do, but they do not address the why. There's no emphasis on explaining how they research, where they find their inspiration or reference, what are different parts of the costumes and why they are added and the function they serve, etc.

The only exception is Kevin Chen who actually talks about the design, explaining the design concepts and what to think about when tackling costume design, such as dealing with porportion, cutlines, materials and functionality.

There are a few step-by-step process walkthrough, and sometimes artists have helpful pointers, but most of the time they are just too brief or vague.

Overall, this book is not very insightful for those looking to explore the concepts and ideas behind costume design. The artworks featured are great though, coming from professional artists like Constantine Sekeris the author himself, Scott Robertson, Neville Page, Jerad S. Marantz and more.

I'm quite disappointed the book went in the opposite direction from what's advertised in the book description. This is more of an artbook rather than an educational or instructional book.

For the book that it advertises itself to be, I'll probably rate it 1-2 out of 5 stars. As an artbook, I'll give it 3.5 out of 5 stars pulled down by the content.

Costume Design & Illustration: for Film, Video Games and Animation is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN) and Book Depository

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Holding this book in hand makes me think back to how excited I was when I first watched the The Legend of Korra. I'm not sure why but this does not often happen with other animation art books. Perhaps it's because I really like the stories and ideas from the world of Avatar.

This is a large 184-page hardcover artbook, similar in size to the earlier two artbooks, namely The Legend of Korra: Book 1 – Air, The Art of the Animated Series and Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Art of the Animated Series. The reproduction of the art is excellent. Images are huge and sharp and printed on thick paper.

Content in the book is split into chapters each dedicated to an episode in Book 2: Spirits. So there are 14 chapters for those plus one extra chapter for ancillary art.

The concept art featured are wonderful and beautiful. They are a mixture of character designs, environment art and storyboards, all completed with insightful commentary from creators Michael Dante DiMartino, Bryan Konietzko and director Joaquin Dos Santos.

The characters appear in the book in chronological order as they appear in the animation. You get to see how they are updated in terms of costumes and also the many new characters that are introduced. Most are full coloured while there are also some sketches. Main characters have lots of expression sheets included.

There are several pages of storyboards included and they have good dynamism in terms of composition and direction. There's also this nice sense of liveliness when you see the characters move in the storyboard sequences.

Environment art are mainly concept paintings, not the final ones used in the animation. They are nice because there are several for each location and you get to see the places from different angles. I like the environment art used for the backgrounds that come from the origin story as they are created in the style inspired by Chinese ink wash painting and Japanese woodblock printing.

As usual, there are also many creature designs for the animals and spirits. Those are fun to look at, such as rabbits with dragonfly ears, walking radishes, etc and the lion turtle is shown again with more drawings. Some of these creatures you'll read from the commentary are inspired by those from Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away.

Once in a while, you'll see art that will remind you of Avatar Aang, such as the family portrait photo of Aang with Katara and their kids. Those are quite nostalgic. The images of other Avatars sometimes also send me thinking about their possible back stories.

All in all, this is a truly wonderful artbook.

Most highly recommended.

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HMT Studios, or Home of Multi-Talent Studios, is an art studio based in Manila, Philippines. It was founded in 2011 and today it has a team of artists whose artwork are featured in this book.

Blank is a 156-page hardcover artbook with a circular die-cut on the cover.

The art you'll see are from Emmarson Bautista, Gab Santos, Harvey Tolibao, Kevin Anthony De Castro and Kevin Tolibao.

The book features mostly character designs, mainly fantasy characters, and several superhero fan art. There are also many commissioned artworks such as the card art for Dark Summoner, the iOS game Dragon Cavalier and other projects.

The most impressive artworks come from Harvey Tolibao. He was born on 25 June 1981, held many graphics related jobs before he decided to become a comic artist. He has worked for Dark Horse, Marvel, Zenescope and IDW. The line art from his comic works are just amazing.

Works from the younger artists are good but definitely could be better as they tackle more projects and get more experience.

The highlight of the book is probably the commissioned artworks. Those would be the card art and video game character designs. The card art reminds me of those from Lord of Vermilion which features mostly character and creature-based artworks. The art and designs from HTM Studios are also of top quality.

This book was found at STGCC 2014.

To get the book, I suggest asking HMT Studios on their Facebook page, DeviantArt page or even Basheer Graphic Books.

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Calligraphy: A Book of Contemporary Inspiration is not your usual book on calligraphy or lettering. Instead, it's an artbook inspired by the lines and strokes created by the calligraphy pen. I'm currently interested in learning calligraphy and upon flipping just a few pages of the book, I knew I had to buy it.

It seems that there are two editions for the book. The hardcover is originally published in 2009 while in the paperback edition is released in 2014. The book is written by Denise Lach, a teacher who teaches lettering, design and screenprinting.

This book features beautiful calligraphy inspired artworks. The highlight is the use of the calligraphy pen to recreate the patterns from real life into artworks. For example, it can be using the broad strokes of the nib to draw out letters that resemble the silhouette of a walnut. using repeating letters to recreate textures from nature such as sand, granite rocks, veins of leaves, spikes of cactus, woodgrain and more.

Content is split into chapters featuring specific tools, such as nibs, ruling pen, Cola pen, pipettes and a combination of tools.

Sometimes when you look closely, you will find that the textural artworks are made up of letters, but sometimes they are just many strokes and ink blobs beautifully woven together to form some sort of image, art. There are lots of beautiful examples in this 192-page book.

It's quite an inspiring and creative book. Highly recommended to those who like calligraphy and contemporary illustrations.

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Back in 1995, I think there was a series of artbooks released for Dragon Ball, one of which was translated by Viz Media into the English edition called Dragon Ball: The Complete Illustrations. I said "I think" because I saw several other volumes on Amazon Japan that had the same cover art format.

Anyway, fast forward to 2013, there's this new artbook called the DRAGON BALL超画集 (Dragon Ball Ultimate Artbook). This is a 240-page hardcover slipcase edition published by Shueisha (集英社), the same publisher for the Japanese artbooks.

The book collects the Dragon Ball illustrations from the original manga series, the updated series in 2002, the short series Neko Majin, miscellaneous art created over the years after the manga run ended in 1995, such as those for Japanese comic magazines, up to the 2013 animated film Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods. At the back of the book is an index with captions to all the artworks listed. This also includes the self portraits of Akira Toriyama from each of the manga volumes.

The art is fantastic, they look great even back when Akira Toriyama was just starting out, and it just gets better. The full colour illustrations are wonderfully reproduced on the thick pages. The production value for this book is high and comes with nice slipcase.

In terms of duplication, this book has most of the art from Dragon Ball: The Complete Illustrations with just changes in layout and sizes of the artworks. The additional illustrations are from within the last decade from 1995 onwards until 2013, and those make up about 100+ pages. So some of the artworks in the earlier book has been taken out and replaced by the new artworks.

Is it worth it to get this book if you have the Viz Media's English book? Well, I think it would have to depend on whether you have been following Dragon Ball after the manga series have ended. It would make more sense because you'll be able to relate more the the artworks. Many of the illustrations towards the back of the book are from after 1995.

It's quite nostalgic looking at the early artworks. Reminds me of the fun times when reading the manga as a kid. I remember marvelling at the miscellaneous illustrations that are not related to the story, such as those chapter splash pages where there are vehicles such as bikes and cars. Dragon Ball could be what got me interested in manga and art in the first place.

I'm not sure if Viz Media is going to translate this from Japanese, you can contact them to find out.

This is a nice updated edition for Dragon Ball fans.

DRAGON BALL超画集 (Dragon Ball Ultimate Artbook) is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN) | CDJapan

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Sketching from the Imagination: Fantasy is a delightful sequel to the earlier book which is also from 3dtotal Publishing, namely Sketching from the Imagination: An Insight into Creative Drawing.

For those who love sketchbooks, you'll be treated to another 320-page volume of beautiful sketches from top artists around the world. I really enjoyed the earlier book and I'm thrilled to have another thick compilation of sketches.

The layout is nice. There's a very sketchbook feel with textured line borders, handwritten headings, the many sketches wonderfully reproduced, many printed to the edge.

The artists featured appear alphabetically. They talk about their love for sketching, inspiration and ideas, the materials they use, and their sketching techniques. Every sketch also comes with a short caption. This is an insightful and inspiring book, one that you will want to leave close to you on the table or shelf.

This volume focuses on fantasy. There are many character designs, mostly human based, but occasionally there are those walkers like orcs, skeletons or anthropomorphic characters. There are only a few fantasy environment sketches.

The art is fantastic. Sketching tools are usually pen and pencils, and you'll get to see how these artists use theirs to draw such beautiful drawings. Some are so refined, especially the pencil drawings, that I would consider them as finished art rather than just a sketch. Overall, it's really great to see the imaginative and creative product of these artists.

I really wish 3dtotal Publishing would come up with more of these sketchbook volumes, perhaps for creature design, environment, sci-fi, comics. It would be a blast if that happens!

Definitely highly recommended. Fantastic value for money.

If you like this sketchbook, I would also recommend the following:

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Breath of Fire is significant to Capcom for being their first real RPG. The game was released in 1993 and the original Japanese artbook ブレスオブファイアオフィシャルコンプリートワークス was released in 2005 and then reprinted in 2010, and now in 2014 Udon has translated the book to English as a large 192-page paperback.

The book features the concept art from Breath of Fire I to V.

The promotional and cover art gallery appear in the first few pages. Art for the re-release games are also included, e.g. the first game came out in Super Nintendo and the re-release was for Game Boy Advance. You get to see the new promotional art created for those re-releases. The rest of the book are mostly character designs with a bit of background art.

It's interesting to observe the evolution of art from the first to the last game. Early artworks from I & II look like they were coloured illustrations drawn for manga in those times, with III and IV the colouring is more anime like with clear edges that define colour changes, and then in V it has more refined colouring. The quality definitely matured and improved with time.

This book is actually part concept art part visual companion. Characters come with character profiles, and for concept art there are the commentary from designers. There's a nice mixture of coloured art and line sketches. The art looks beautiful with lots of fantasy creatures and beasts to check out. In the game, main character Ryu gets to transform into dragons, and you'll get to see those dragons in the book.

Enemy designs have the art direction of typical desktop RPG games. Here they are more stylized than hyper-realistic. I guess if you look at the stylized character designs, you can sort of expect the creatures to exist in the same world.

For Breath of Fire fans, this book is going to be a trip down memory lane as you look at artworks that were created more than 2 decades ago when the first game just came out.

It's a great book for the fans. Quite worth the money.

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This book was inspired by The Art of Darksiders II and the artists at Vigil Games, the company that produced Darksiders. Vigil Games was closed down in 2013 and there was this idea of getting reconnecting with the artists to come up with an artbook. SUBSTRATA is that book.

There are 80 artists featured in this book and that includes artists from other top game studios. Hats off to illustrator Paul Richards for putting in the serious effort of curating so much artworks and getting all these artists together.

The artworks featured are fantastic. It's concept art galore. There are lots of character and creature designs, and to a lesser extent art for environments and other miscellaneous subjects. There are sketches, many full-colour full-page illustrations, and even 3D models. The ideas and designs are gorgeous, which makes it a nice book to flip through occasionally for inspiration.

All the works are very detailed and look amazing. In some way, SUBSTRATA feels like a portfolio book for these artists, a random display of top notch art. There's no narrative, and there's no fictitious game that these artists are designing for. The only text you'll see are the artists' names and their website.

Other similar books that come to my mind would be the artbooks from Massive Black, Feng Zhu but SUBSTRATA represents better value for money because it's more affordable, there are more pages (240 in all) and the art is great.

Udon mentioned that proceeds from the book will go to the charity organization Gamers For Good.

This is an awesome concept art book. Highly recommended.

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I started following Robh Ruppel's art ever since I learned that he was behind the art direction of Uncharted 2. Back then, I was mesmerised by the staging and composition of the game's environment art from The Art of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves artbook. Robh Ruppel has a way of framing scenes such that they always look so inviting. So it's great to see this new book from him.

Many of the artworks in Graphic L.A. have appeared previously on his blog The Broadview Blog. There are additional art as well as many sketches included. The drawn subjects are mostly urban scenes from Los Angeles, hence the title of the book.

In Graphic L.A., Robh Ruppel adopts a more graphical approach to creating his illustrations. The emphasis is on breaking down scenes into geometric shapes and symbols, focus on getting the correct tonal values, and then working with that in mind to create a graphic representation of a scene. It's sort of similar to how some watercolour artists think about shapes for their paintings.

The artworks are stylised and beautiful. There's even a vector quality to his artworks that is characterised by sharp edges. The colour scheme is very tastefully done. The paintings remind me of photographs that are treated with some colour filters, or those from old school film cameras. This more vector-like style with strong symbolism is a departure from his other painterly style, which you can see in his earlier artbook Aspect Ratio and older works from his blog's archive.

There are quite a few sketches included and they are experimentation and exploration of values, shapes and silhouette. They remind me of another book Framed Ink which also touts the importance of having good value design.

Where the book falls short would be in the area of instructions and insight. The use of white space is usually plastered by tips in large typefaces. There are good tips as well as vague tips that could do with more elaboration. Some of the insightful information that I read on his blog are not in the book. I wished there could be more shared on techniques, and especially on how he thinks about colour schemes.

It's a beautiful artbook. I enjoy looking at how other artists use composition to frame their drawings, in this case Robh Ruppel is a master at doing so.

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I remembered the first time I encountered Anders Zorn’s works was more than 10 years ago. It was a series of etching he did and they were on the internet. I was captivated by his use of expressive light and shadow then and printed out all the images. Little did I know that he was also a great painter and often compared to John Singer Sargent, especially on their commissioned portraits of the high society in 1900s.

ANDERS ZORN: A European Artist Seduces America is the long awaited catalogue for this under-represented artist till now. It documents the artist’s fascinating works and biography. The catalogue showcases the Swedish artist’s artistic development and his rightful place in the art world of the 19th century.

The book is 176 pages and divided into a few major sections. The first part is a series of articles on Anders Zorn and how he achieved his spectacular success and “becoming Zorn”. The articles are very well researched and written. There's a lot written on his style and working method, especially how he meticulously set up his painting from sketches and studies.

The other sections are “Society Potraits” , “Modern Life” and “Rural Life” . In each of the sections, you will find artworks that are beautifully printed and accompanying articles.

Looking through the artworks, you wonder how the artist manages to straddle between the world of high society and the rural life in his rural hometown of Sweden.

This is the first time that Ander Zorn’s major artworks were brought together for the exhibition, and the catalogue displays the best of it. You can get a good sense of how versatile the artist was by his masterful paintings and etchings.

I would highly recommend this book for readers to have an understanding of the artist’s oeuvre. You can check out some art books on John Singer Sargent and compare how these two major artists’ works are similar and different.

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This is a belated but welcome translation by publisher Viz Media of the original Japanese artbook The Art of The Princess Mononoke—もののけ姫. Princess Mononoke and and the accompanying artbook came out in 1997. By the way, that Japanese artbook is still being reprinted even after so many years.

I've reviewed the original Japanese artbook before, and also the other English edition by Miramax Books. There's no point getting those books now because one's in Japanese and the other is out of print. Viz Media's books are widely available.

The interior pages of this English edition is laid out exactly the same as the Japanese book, only the text have been replaced. One other difference is this book is a hardcover vs the textured dust jacket paperback Japanese edition. This 224-page hardcover has well reproduced pictures on low to no gloss paper. Very good.

The book starts off with a few poems and an introduction by Hayao Miyazaki before it goes into the concept art.

The concept art is a mixture of character designs, movie stills, environment art, storyboards and several computer animation screenshots. There are line drawings as well as the pencil and watercolour sketches of Hayao Miyazaki. There aren't many studios that still use watercolour sketches to create concept art nowadays so it's always refreshing to see the ones from Studio Ghibli. The sketches may look loose but they convey the action and settings clearly, and they look charming.

The environment art are by Kazuo Oga and some of his artworks have also appeared in 男鹿和雄画集II (Oga Kazuo Animation Artworks 2). There are a lot of background paintings and not one of them are credited so it's impossible to tell if they are all from Kazuo Oga.

Towards the back are three tutorials that look at how the film is made, such as the use of computers for compositing, colouring and backgrounds. That's followed by selected storyboards. Finally there's a 3-year production diary that records down the milestones and activities. Even things like Hayao Miyazaki going for his acupuncture sessions are also recorded. Amusing.

Just like other Studio Ghibli artbooks, this is a wonderful companion to the film. Highly recommended to fans of Princess Mononoke and Studio Ghibli.

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On the left is The Art of The Princess Mononoke—もののけ姫

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More good mechs

It seems the first book Nuthin' But Mech was quite popular hence we have this sequel. From what I can see on the Nuthin' But Mech website, there's even a volume 3 coming up scheduled for 2015.

Nuthin' But Mech Volume 2 features 41 top artists who have contributed some pretty awesome artworks as curated by Lorin Wood. There's a nice variety of styles to check out. For example, James Gurney is included, so imagine his dinosaur inspired mechs. Or check out Eric Joyner's retro old school robots that stands in contrast to all other high tech sci-fi mechs.

There's a good mixture of 2D paintings and 3D models, and a couple of sketches. The 3D models are really detailed, and 2D paintings masterful. Makes me wish there's some sort of tutorial books that teaches us how to create all these stuff.

It's a great book for those who like mechs and robots.

A portion of the proceeds from this book will be donated to Francis Tsai Family. Francis Tsai is an artist and one of the contributors in the book. Unfortunately, he was diagnosed with ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease. This gesture is sign of support for him.

The full list of artists included are:

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John Vernon Lord is an artist from England born in 1939. He has been drawing for over 50 years. He has drawn for books like Aesop's Fables, many children classic's such as Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Shark, and he has also written and illustrated books himself, with The Giant Jam Sandwich being the most popular and has been in print for over thirty years.

Drawn to Drawing is in essence a sketchbook. It collects pen and ink drawings, doodles and diary entries. Lord likes to use cross hatching for his ink drawings, and occasionally some gouache and watercolour. There are few commissioned works but the bulk are his personal sketches.

His sketchbook pages are filled to the brim, sometimes with seemingly disconnected ideas, sometimes with his diary entries written meticulously that fills up the pages. A magnifying glass is needed if you want to read the handwritten notes on his sketchbook. There are quick doodles drawn during meetings as well as those that take him over 200 hours to complete. I particularly enjoy his detail pen and ink works. There's both a comic art and at times editorial feel to them. Starting out as a freelance illustrator, he draws everything.

Every decade starting from the 1950s is headed by a memoir talking about his work during those 10 years. You'll get a perspective of what life is like for an illustrator living in the 1950s and follow his career from a student until he became a university professor who teaches illustration.

It's a book that illustrators might find interesting, a good retrospective of Lord's sketches and thoughts.

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When it comes to movie poster illustrations, John Alvin and Drew Struzan are among the best.

The Art of John Alvin is a wonderful retrospective and tribute to the late artist who passed away in 2008.

This 160-page hardcover collects the movie posters he has created from 1974 to 1999 plus a special commissioned piece completed in 2007. The artworks includes the finished posters, preliminary sketches, colour drafts and many unused never seen before art.

The reproduction of the artworks is very well done. Many are printed huge and given the full page treatment they deserve. The completed movie poster illustrations are beautiful, and even the sketches are quite a joy to look at as some of them are really detailed.

John Alvin's foray into illustrating movie posters started in 1974 with Blazing Saddles. Soon after that, he got called up to create many more, such as for Blade Runner, Return of the Jedi. E.T., Willow, Batman, Batman Returns, Jurassic Park, several Disney classics such as Pinocchio, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, The Lion King and many more other movies.

Each movie he worked on comes with several sketches, finished coloured illustrations and the final actual poster. For Jurassic Park there were more than a dozen rough drawings and colour layouts.

The artworks are all accompanied commentary that includes the story behind the posters, on how he got the job, conceptualising and even the techniques he used to create the illustrations. The behind the scenes stories are all provided by his wife Andrea Alvin who works alongside him in his studio. No wonder the writeup is so informative and detailed.

It's nice to read about the technical stuff, to find out how he worked, for example, to create the glow behind the words for E.T., he cut out a cardboard for the words and sprayed around them. There are bits of technical talk here and there for the posters.

Overall, this is a well produced, insightful and inspiring artbook.

Highly recommended.

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The Art of The Boxtrolls is a pleasing companion artbook to Laika's third stop-motion film. There are plenty of pre-production art for the characters, sets and a substantial amount of text talking about the film making process.

The film is actually adapted from Alan Snow's Here Be Monsters! children book. For those who've read the book before, you might find it a bit more interesting to see how the characters are designed and made into stop-motion characters.

Michel Breton's design of old Europe and the houses on the sloping streets of Cheesebridge are delightful to look at. Art direction is driven by production designer Paul Lasaine and art director Curt Enderle.

Those who enjoy finding out how stop-motion films are made should find the text quite insightful. It takes about the challenges during production, such as creating the puppets, armature, costumes and the sets. There are many details that a director has to take note of and the book reveals a bit of those. Designers also talk about the little details such as props that don't draw attention to themselves.

I had thought everything in the film was physically made but in fact several sets such as the buildings in the background are actually computer generated.

My only gripe is there should have been more photos of the puppets because they look terrific. Readers expecting more behind-the-scenes photos would be disappointed but I feel the plethora of concept art do make up for it. This is a 160-page hardcover.

Ultimately, it's a satisfactory companion and a book I can recommend to fans of the film.

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ILLUSTRATION 2014 イラストレーション 2014 is the yearly annual artbook that features Japanese style illustrationa. This should be a new series because there's only one earlier volume for 2013, ILLUSTRATION 2013. Both are worth getting if you want to check out upcoming Japanese artists and trends in Japanese art.

ILLUSTRATION 2014 is a 320-page paperback that features 150 artists with a huge variety of styles to check out. Each artist only has two pages, with one full page illustration and 3 to 4 on the other page. There's the artist profile with website included so you can follow up. Most artworks are character based.

One of the things that caught my eye about the book is the use of colours. The artists are not afraid to use striking or unusual colour palettes.

Another book worth checking out which is quite similar is the Pixiv Almanac Volume 1.

ILLUSTRATION 2014 [JAPANESE EDITION ART WORKS] [BOOK] is available at Amazon (US | JP | CN) and CDJapan