Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Your Favourite Art Books From 2008 Contest Results

Thanks to everyone for participating in the 2008 favourite art books contest. The response is not bad. Maybe I'll hold another one for 2009.

The winner for this contest/lucky draw is yash gupta. Congratulations, you've won yourself a $20 Amazon voucher!

Below are the other entries from other readers who left their comments. I've provided links back to the readers' websites, and the books are linked to Amazon.

There are lots of books I've not seen before. Thanks for the recommendations!



Nicole

1. Shadowline, the Iain McCaig artbook. It has some of the nicest printing I've seen in a while, and as I'm particularly fond of his sketches, it's definitely one of my favorites. Link: Iain McCaig homepage

2. Art of Paul Bonner. Lots of art, very high quality prints, and plenty of stuff I hadn't seen before. Link: Paul Bonner homepage

3. Mark Schultz, Various Drawings 3 - I really like seeing the process work in these, and I think this one's the best of the bunch. Mark Schultz doesn't get nearly as much attention as he merits, IMO. Link: wikipedia page for Mark Schultz.



Francis Vallejo

1. N.C. Wyeth: Catalogue Raisonn: BEAUTIFUL repros over 700 pages. A staggering amount of his work is reproduced. Finally a fitting book for this legendary and influential artist. Great photos of his studio. A good balance of smaller thumbnails and full page spreads. Good literature as well. Link: wikipedia page for N.C.Wyeth.

2.VICTOR PROUVÉ (1858-1943): Terrific book on the often overlooked French artist. With a hint of Toulouse Lautrec and Sargent, along with scupltures, Prouve is a great inspiration.

3. JC Leyendecker by Laurence S. Cutler et.al:
Again one of the greatest illustrators to live receives a gorgeous book with great reproductions of all his covers from Colliers to the SE Post. It's a good year for Golden Age Illustrators. Now we just need a Mead Schaeffer book!!!



dugbuddy

1. Fables Covers: The Art of James Jean. With preliminary sketches included for the works it is a wonderful capturing of one of the hottest illustrators recently. Link: James Jean homepage

2. Classical Painting Atelier: by Juliette Aristides. A detailed look into the return of realism in figurative painting. This book is flat out wonderful, a great read, and print wise has great color. Her drawing book companion from 2006 is also a must for any artist.

3. Spectrum 15: Consistently good printing, wonderful imagery, and where else do you ever get to see an collection of talent of this caliper? Link: Spectrum homepage



Otto

1. Art of Kung Fu Panda: What can I say? This is one of the best "art of" books out there. It's up there with The Art of Mulan and The Art and Making of Monster House (also my favorites). Nicolas Marlet is brilliant too!

2. The Totoro Forest Project: Sadly, I do not own the book, but from seeing pictures of the book and all of the artwork on the site, I can already tell that it's an amazing book. All for a good cause too! They're in the talks of a second printing, so I'm prepared to pounce on that! I might just break and get the 1st printing (goes for $200!!).

3. Art of the Modern Movie Poster: International Postwar Style and Design: A monstrous book with movie posters from around the world. There are more than 1,500 images in it. A great book for illustrators, designers, and movie buffs alike.



Lemon

1. The Art of Kung Fu Panda
The art book of the year.

2. Street Fighter Tribute
I love Street Figther and Udon.So this album had to be second.

3. The art of Walle
Great movie and great art book.



Vinod Rams

1. Shadowline: The art of Iain McCaig
Been waiting for it forever. It's great to see some of his non-Star Wars stuff, like the Princess of Mars concepts. I love the personality and sensitivity in his sketches.

2. The Art of Paul Bonner:
The level of detail in his art is amazing and it’s great to finally have a huge collection in one book! The book is big and chunky too!

3. Blade of the Immortal Illustration collection
Another book I’ve been waiting to come out for years! It has a good mix of his old and new covers as well as the amazing grayscale chapter heads.



Peter S

1. "Walt Disney Animation Studio Archive: Story." A wonderful collection of storyboards, showing not just just how pencils drawing depict and diagram movement, but how pencil marks can themselves seems to move.

2. "Willie & Joe: The WWII Years." Watch Bill Mauldin develop as an artist in wartime, with cartoon linework steadily transformed into slumping, slouching, muddy, inky masterpieces.

3. "Alexander Calder: The Paris Years 1926-1933." The catalog captures the playfulness of Calder, whose uses wire and metal like a kind of drawing in the air.

Three runners-up: Lynda Barry, "What It Is" (a wonderful comic/diary/sketchbook/writing workshop/collage); Kramer's Ergot 7. (comic artists working at tabloid size, like the Sunday funnies of the early 20th century; Hiroshige, "The Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kisokaido" (like floating).



inkdestroyedmybrush

1- watching the watchmen - an exhaustive look at Gibbon's work on a true classic of the genre. anyone who wants to be a comic artist should be held and down and forced to look at the amount of work needed to do 12 issues.

2- retroactive - darwyn cooke a neat coffee table book by someone whose style can actually stand up to the enlargement of the pieces!

3 - the art of herge vol 1 - a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes of a master - the foremost practicioner of the belgian "clean line" technique



Sanndra SF

1. Kungfu panda - Amazing artbook,saw this book review from a magazine, then found this book in KINOKUNIYA. From character design to environment setting, this book give quality information and really worth to have it.

2. The art of Sparth, Structura - I am a big fan of sci-fi art. i can't wait to see the book after i ordered it from Amazon. The author,Nicolas Bouvier is a very creative person. I like all his works.

3. HellBoy Library Destruction Devil V.1 - For me it is super good book, the book in hardcover, full color printing,high quality paper. The art works is great and fantastic.



nysv

1. Okami official complete works
The book has beautiful artwork in one of my favorite mediums - watercolor & ink. I haven't even played the game, but the art in this book is just stunning and there's nearly 300 pages of it. The US version was finally released last summer, I recommend picking this one up ASAP.

2. Iain Mccaig's Shadowline
Ok, I don't actually have this yet (on order), however I've really liked Mccaig's linework since I first saw it in the SW Episode I artbook. There's something nice in his character drawings, expecting more of the same goodness in this book.

3. An Illustrated Life
I haven't bought other 2008 released artbooks this year, so my third pick is something I don't personally have.
Anyway, this book looks interesting and it's quite cheap. Although it doesn't have pro quality art the content still looks intriguing, kind of like what's in the Postsecret-book or a collection of flickr posts of sketchbook pages. There's a preview video on the youtube for this



yash gupta

1. Kungfu Panda
Awesome character designs. Love how they've managed to play with the big round body of Po.

2. Art of wall-E
Explores everything from robots to aliens to fat blobby humans. bonus:Eve is designed in collaboration with apple product designer.

3. Art of Bolt
Ordered it on amazon.ca will be getting it soon. Love character designs of Rhino. And the book does not contain too many movie stills is a plus.



Andre Kishimoto

1. The Art of Kung Fu Panda
Lots of character designs. The setting of the movie is beautiful and the book is superb (loved the dragon pressed in the front hardcover)

2. The Art of Halo 3
After beating the game, seeing the (art)work behind the masterpiece is something I really enjoyed.

3. Udon's Street Fighter Tribute
Udon kick a**, and the fact that this book contains hundreds of incredible works from around the globe is just great. You can notice various styles and influences here.



Here's my list of top ten art books for 2008. All links are to my book reviews.
linesandcolors has also compiled a useful list of list of art books. The lists includes a variety of art books across different genres, styles and mediums.

That's all.

Thanks everyone for participating!

Monday, December 29, 2008

Book Review: The Art of Halo 3

If you're awed by the fantastic visuals of Halo 3 on screen, this book will give you the concept art that were used to create them

It is filled with concept art on the characters, vehicles, weapons and the environment. Each character comes with lots of design variations. Master Chief itself has 15 variations, all fully painted to the point I can't tell if they are 3D or digital paint. Some of the characters include ODSTs, Arbiter, Brutes, Flood and Strato Sentinel. At the end of the book, several pages are devoted to paintings of Master Chief.

The second and third chapter contains the war vehicles and weapons. There are lots of sketches and paintings. The really cool part is they have included lots of different rifles that weren't use in the game. The captions that appear throughout explain very briefly the ideas behind designs, same goes for all illustrations in the book.

The next section is the environment paintings. All look really fantastic and they printed them big. There are a few beat boards and storyboards but not much.

The last chapter is filled with random stuff. There are photos of miniatures, t-shirts, promotional items and toys.

The book itself is hardcover without any dust jacket with low gloss pages. The paper stock is not thick enough. The paper became wavy from the glorious art printed on it. Luckily, it doesn't affect the visual quality of the pictures in anyway.

This is a wonderful book to complement the game, highly recommended to all concept artists, game developers and fans of Halo 3. For the price, it's worth every cent.

Special thanks to Kelvin Chan for providing the book for this short review.

The Art of Halo 3

The Art of Halo 3

The Art of Halo 3

The Art of Halo 3

The Art of Halo 3

The Art of Halo 3

The Art of Halo 3

The Art of Halo 3

The Art of Halo 3

The Art of Halo 3



Visit the link beside to read more reviews on Amazon. If you buy from the link, I get a little commission that helps me get more art books for review.

Country-specific Amazon links for this book:
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.fr | Amazon.de

Saturday, December 27, 2008

The Venice Chronicles from Enrico Casarosa

The Venice Chronicles from Enrico Casarosa

If you love sketchbooks or watercolors, you'll love The Venice Chronicles. It's a sketchbook, travelogue, comic thrown into a sturdy hardcover book with a love story at its core.

The artist is Enrico Casarosa, a story artist at Pixar. He has a blog where he post lots of artwork and thoughts so be sure to check it out!

The sketches in the book are wonderful and watercolor beautiful. The characters are appealing and, well, real. I can't remember if I've seen water colour comics before but there it is in this unique book. The story is about his travel with his girl.

Included also is a section on how they met, and how he used his drawings to attract her attention — of course!

Enrico has created a Flickr set for the book where you can read the pages, best viewed in slideshow mode.

The Venice Chronicles from Enrico Casarosa

The Venice Chronicles from Enrico Casarosa

You can also check out the creative process of the book on Enrico's Flickr photoset titled The making of The Venice Chronicles, also best viewed in slideshow mode. I love the photo of him painting and carrying the baby at the same time — multitasking creative talent.

The Venice Chronicles from Enrico Casarosa

If you like the book, do support him by purchasing a copy.

The books are available on:
Enrico's online store | Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.fr | Amazon.de

Amazon sells it cheaper though. Reviews are already in on Amazon and they are very positive.

Book Review: The Art of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

This art book is noticeably better that the already good The Art of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

This time round, even more details are added to the concept art. Most of the sketches are now coloured. As usual, the pages are filled to the brim with character designs, environment paintings, storyboards, sculptures and ships. All drawings are captioned by the individual artists on the idea they are trying to bring across.

In some ways, the character designs and sketches look better on book than in the movie. The environment paintings are just epic.

Included also, at the back of the book, is the full script for the movie.

This book is highly recommended to sci-fi artists, concept artists and of course Star Wars fans.

Also check out The Art of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and The Art of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

Special thanks to Kelvin Chan for providing the book for this short review.



The Art of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

The Art of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

The Art of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

The Art of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

The Art of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

The Art of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

The Art of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

The Art of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

The Art of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

The Art of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

Visit the link beside to read more reviews on Amazon. If you buy from the link, I get a little commission that helps me get more art books for review.

Country-specific Amazon links for the hardcover book:
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.fr | Amazon.de

Country-specific Amazon links for the paperback book:
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.fr | Amazon.de

Check out other books reviewed on this blog, with pictures:
Art book list | Design book list

Thursday, December 25, 2008

Book Review: The Cinematic Art of World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King

The publisher of this book is Insights Editions, one of my favourite publishers. Their art books always have extra goodies, at least for the ones I bought. In this case, there are two 8” x 10” original art cards in a tipped-in-vellum sleeve and a 12-page booklet on the creation of Sindragosa.

This is a paperback book and the binding doesn't look strong (see an example). Strangely, no hardcover version alternative is available. The pages are rather glossy and oily fingers will definitely leave smudges. They are given the silver-color treatment and the text printed on these silver "plates" is extremely classy.

The book details the production process of the animation in great detail. There is conceptualization, story development, character development, production design and even the 3D execution. To make the book complete, they also included how they did the soundtrack and audio.

On the art side, it starts off with storyboards on the introduction of Tuskassr and Lich King's entrance. Following that are pages of characters, armour, monsters, dragons and environment paintings. There's a generous amount of concept art on Sindragosa and the undead. Also included are multiple screenshots of their 3D creation process like creating matte paintings, composition, animating, rendering, etc. This book is literally packed with artwork.

Blizzard has done a tremendous job with the book and with their game. They have brought together a brilliant team of artists to showcase their talent to the world.

The Cinematic Art of World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King is a stunning art book. I recommend it to all fans of World of Warcraft, or any fantasy concept artists.

Special thanks to Kelvin Chan for providing the book for this short review.

The Cinematic Art of World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King

The Cinematic Art of World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King

The Cinematic Art of World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King

The Cinematic Art of World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King

The Cinematic Art of World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King

The Cinematic Art of World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King

The Cinematic Art of World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King

The Cinematic Art of World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King

The Cinematic Art of World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King

The Cinematic Art of World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King



Visit the link beside to read more reviews on Amazon. If you buy from the link, I get a little commission that helps me get more art books for review.

Country-specific Amazon links for this book:
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.fr | Amazon.de

Book Review: Spider-Man The Icon: The Life and Times of a Pop Culture Phenomenon

This is a behemoth of a book, in terms of size and content. Spider-man has been given an impressive coverage.

The amount of research done by author Steve Saffel shows. Included is the whole history of Spider-man up to the blockbuster movies. That's from when Stan Lee was only a coffee boy and comics were only 12 cents!

There's everything a Spider-man fan could wish to read about. Licensing, toys, media coverage, marketing of comics overseas, re-adaption to different mediums and so much more. The book is written in chronological order. We can see how Spider-man has changed and garnered the immerse popularity it has today.

There are tons of pictures in the book. Included are comic covers, toys merchandise, sketches, posters and photos. Every one is well captioned. The clear evolution for Spider-man and his villains can be clearly seen flipping through the pages.

There are 320 pages, a rather thick book made more so with the high quality minimal-gloss paper. It will take a while to finish the book.

It's highly recommended to all fans of Spider-man.

Meanwhile, if you like Spider-man 3 the movie, you should also check out The Spider-man Chronicles.



Spider-Man The Icon: The Life and Times of a Pop Culture Phenomenon

Spider-Man The Icon: The Life and Times of a Pop Culture Phenomenon

Spider-Man The Icon: The Life and Times of a Pop Culture Phenomenon

Spider-Man The Icon: The Life and Times of a Pop Culture Phenomenon

Spider-Man The Icon: The Life and Times of a Pop Culture Phenomenon

Spider-Man The Icon: The Life and Times of a Pop Culture Phenomenon

Spider-Man The Icon: The Life and Times of a Pop Culture Phenomenon

Spider-Man The Icon: The Life and Times of a Pop Culture Phenomenon

Spider-Man The Icon: The Life and Times of a Pop Culture Phenomenon

Spider-Man The Icon: The Life and Times of a Pop Culture Phenomenon

Visit the link beside to read more reviews on Amazon. If you buy from the link, I get a little commission that helps me get more art books for review.

Country-specific Amazon links for this book:
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.fr | Amazon.de

Check out other books reviewed on this blog, with pictures:
Art book list | Design book list