Here are 100 books that The Fantasy Illustrator's Technique Book fans have personally recommended if you like
The Fantasy Illustrator's Technique Book.
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I have been drawing fantasy creatures and characters for over thirty years now, and have collected hundreds of fantasy, art, and art instruction books over the decades. Both drawing and reading are a passion of mine, so I am happy to share some of my favorite fantasy art books that I have in my own personal library.
Pui-Mun Law has been one of my favorite artists since I discovered her website over twenty years ago. She is an accomplished artist, and her books are not only filled with beautiful artwork that will inspire any fantasy artist, but also contain very detailed tutorials and sketches. Although the tutorials focus on finishing pieces using watercolor, this book is also filled with beautiful pencil sketches and guides on drawing different poses, body parts, and scenery to suit your fantasy character. Her watercolor style is uniquely detailed and precise, which makes the book a great reference for artists using drawing mediums as well.
Angels, faeries and mermaids have engaged the imaginations and enchanted the brushes of artists for centuries. Now you can evoke the spirit of these mystical creatures and create fantastic works of ethereal art in watercolor. Twenty step-by-step projects show how to create fantastic scenes that are elegantly styled, brilliantly colored, and alive with a sense of wonder.
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I have been drawing fantasy creatures and characters for over thirty years now, and have collected hundreds of fantasy, art, and art instruction books over the decades. Both drawing and reading are a passion of mine, so I am happy to share some of my favorite fantasy art books that I have in my own personal library.
This book is a great choice for artists that are interested in drawing humanoid fantasy characters or superheroes. It takes a close look at drawing action poses and includes many sketches and example drawings. It also includes photo references to use. It isn’t as much of a step-by-step tutorial book, but a great reference with lots of advice on creating your own dynamic characters.
An indispensable guide for anyone interested in improving and developing their fantasy art figures.
Fantasy artists are unlikely to use models to draw from life but, to be successful, their creations must have a grounding in reality. This book by successful comic and fantasy artist Glenn Fabry, teaches you the principles of anatomy, from musculature and skeletal structure through to movement.
You can then develop your artistic style by breaking and bending the rules of anatomy through practical exercises and demonstrations, accompanied by incredible finished artworks. The step-by-step exercises help you to fully understand the subtle movements that combine to…
I have been drawing fantasy creatures and characters for over thirty years now, and have collected hundreds of fantasy, art, and art instruction books over the decades. Both drawing and reading are a passion of mine, so I am happy to share some of my favorite fantasy art books that I have in my own personal library.
John Howe is a renowned Canadian Illustrator and artist best known for his artwork depicting Tolkien’s Middle Earth. While this is not a typical how-to or step-by-step art instruction book, it is nonetheless a must-have book full of tips on creating fantasy creatures, scenes, and landscapes, with many case studies showing some of the steps he followed when creating his masterpieces.
This is the premise behind John Howe's first practical exploration of his artistic inspirations, approaches and techniques. This title will appeal to practical artists and fans of John Howe's work by providing step-by-step demonstrations, sketches and oustanding finished paintings, some designed specifically for this book. It covers a wide range of subjects essential to any aspiring fantasy artist, including materials and the creative process, and drawing and painting humans, beasts, landscapes and architecture. The final section of the book provides further inspiration and guidance on presenting work in various forms including film work,…
Coyote weather is the feral, hungry season, drought-stricken, and ready to catch fire. It’s 1967, and the American culture is violently remaking itself while the country is forcibly sending its young men to fight in a deeply unpopular war.
Jerry has stubbornly made no plans for the future because he…
I have been drawing fantasy creatures and characters for over thirty years now, and have collected hundreds of fantasy, art, and art instruction books over the decades. Both drawing and reading are a passion of mine, so I am happy to share some of my favorite fantasy art books that I have in my own personal library.
Whitlatch is best known for her creature designs for Lucasfilms, so as you can imagine her book is full of amazing illustrations explaining how to design your very own creature. It specifically takes a look at breaking down and combining different types of animals from the five vertebrate classes, as well as a close look at using dinosaurs as a reference.
What is creature design? We all have a notion―mostly consisting of evocative images of otherworldly beings galloping, swimming, flying, and often attacking the hero of an epic film or story. But what makes a creature believable? In the follow-up to her bestseller, Animals Real and Imagined: The Fantasy of What Is and What Might Be, world-renowned artist Terryl Whitlatch reveals the secret behind believable creature design: anatomy. How anatomy applies practically to the natural history and story is the prime cornerstone on which successful creature design hangs, whether the creature is real or imaginary. Studying, understanding, drawing, and applying accurate…
I'm a social anthropologist who has lived, dreamed, and worked in Syria most of her life. Having spent my childhood in Damascus I always yearned to return. After completing my PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the economy of modern Bedouin Tribes, I won a Fulbright award to teach at the University of Damascus. Since then, Damascus has been at the centre of my academic and social life. I met my husband there, a British helicopter pilot, sent there to learn Arabic. I'm an emeritus professor of anthropology and forced migration at the University of Oxford and my research has been on the forced migrant communities who make up Syria’s cosmopolitan society.
This is a truly remarkable work. I was expecting a straightforward book of art but discovered a wonderful portrait of Syria in the 20th century. It is an original, creative, and deeply contextualized lens into the modern political history of Greater Syria. It successfully brings natural Syria, Bilad al Sham, into our frame of reference through the work of three main artists: Khalil Gibran, Adham Ismail, and Fateh al Moudarres. In its early chapters, it skillfully describes and analyses Syria’s interface with the late Ottoman period. The Interwar Mandate period is particularly well researched and articulated in drawing Syrian plastic arts into view, as France and other European diplomats, philosophers, and anthropologists’ influenced individual Syrian poets, and philosophers either during their sojourns in Europe or at home in Syria. Beautiful Agitation is an enchanting read, scholarly and lively, making sense for the first time of important Syrian artists’…
In modern Syria, a contested territory at the intersection of differing regimes of political representation, artists ventured to develop strikingly new kinds of painting to link their images to life forces and agitated energies. Examining the works of artists Kahlil Gibran, Adham Ismail, and Fateh al-Moudarres, Beautiful Agitation explores how painters in Syria activated the mutability of form to rethink relationships of figure to ground, outward appearance to inner presence, and self to world. Drawing on archival materials in Syria and beyond, Anneka Lenssen reveals new trajectories of painterly practice in a twentieth century defined by shifting media technologies, moving…
I have been passionate about the underlying drivers of environmentally destructive human behavior since I was invited to participate in a study of the impacts of oil development on coastal California when I was in graduate school. At a basic level, I have always been interested in economic development, organizational behavior, and public policy. This project gave me the opportunity to explore the intersection of those interests and expand them into the impacts of humans generally on natural and human-made environments. Southern California oil development and its impacts were not my dissertation topic, but it is one that literally hits close to home, and I have been pursuing it for almost three decades.
This is an amazing book on many levels and makes you look at every Van Gogh painting you’ve ever seen in the context of industrialization and the damage it was causing to the landscapes we associate with nature and beauty in the late nineteenth century.
The beautifully reproduced artworks are replete with smokestacks and locomotive engines spewing smoke into the air from coal combustion. Van Gogh also gives us polluted canals and rivers. Lobel shows us what we miss when looking at Van Gogh as a depiction of nature. I am now itching to get back to the Van Gogh Museum at all those irises in a whole new light. Like Extraction Ecologies, this book shows us our future from a distant past.
A groundbreaking reassessment that foregrounds Van Gogh's profound engagement with the industrial age while making his work newly relevant for our world today
"Van Gogh has never seemed more relevant. This stands as my favorite book of the year in any genre."-John Vincler, Cultured
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) is most often portrayed as the consummate painter of nature whose work gained its strength from his direct encounters with the unspoiled landscape. Michael Lobel upends this commonplace view by showing how Van Gogh's pictures are inseparable from the modern industrial era in which the artist lived-from its factories and…
Homeless following the death of his adoptive parents in a car crash and the subsequent loss of their farm tenancy, Seb decides to enrol as a residential student at the Asklepios Foundation, a College of Natural Medicine, boasting a sanctuary modelled on an ancient Greek healing temple. Spending a night…
The world opened to me in a safe space when I learned to read as a child, and by 6th grade I regularly hauled home stacks of books from the library and, inspired by Jo March, hoped to be an author. I put aside my dream of writing and pursued other career goals until my marriage to Mark Buehner. It was his career as an illustrator that opened a path for me to write, and together we have created many picture books, including the Snowmen at Night series. I’ve learned that stories are told with pictures as well as words, and beautiful picture books can be savored at any age.
Local to me, I’ve been familiar with the gorgeous poster and mural art of Greg Newbold. More recently he has teamed up with his wife Amy to create a series of picture books showcasing the styles of renowned artists. This first book takes snowmen and imagines what they would look like if painted by artists such as Van Gogh, Dali, Picasso, O’Keefe, and others. An excellent introduction to the painting styles of famous artists, with informative text to reinforce the idea that “not all artists paint the same.”
From that simple premise flows this delightful, whimsical, educational picture book that shows how the artist's imagination can summon magic from a prosaic subject. Greg Newbold's chameleon-like artistry shows us Roy Lichtenstein's snow hero saving the day, Georgia O'Keefe's snowman blooming in the desert, Claude Monet's snowmen among haystacks, Grant Wood's American Gothic snowman, Jackson Pollock's snowman in ten thousand splats, Salvador Dali's snowmen dripping like melty cheese, and snowmen as they might have been rendered by J. M. W. Turner, Gustav Klimt, Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, Georges Seurat, Pablita Velarde, Piet Mondrian, Sonia Delaunay, Jacob Lawrence, and Vincent van…
I absolutely love the Pre-Raphaelites, they are my utter passion and these books are the fuel for that fire. Who wouldn't want to be a Pre-Raphaelite woman? Smart, talented, resourceful, these women define what it is to make a mark and great some of the most ground-breaking art in history. I'm particularly obsessed with Pre-Raphaelite women, the artists and muses who created the art we love so much today. After spending almost 30 years researching their lives and loves, it's now my absolute pleasure in telling everyone about these astonishing women, and why we should love them and learn from them.
The first time I saw a Pre-Raphaelite painting, I was immediately besotted and this was the first book I could find on the subject. Despite being over half a century old, this is the best starting book, filled with images and engagingly written, which will lead to a life-long passion for the subject. It's a handy size and like all the T&H World of Art books, it's an essential part of your Pre-Raphaelite library.
The works of the Pre-Raphaelites are among the best known and best loved of all English paintings, and yet there has long been a tendency to dismiss them as mere Victoriana, and to deny them their proper status as works of art. This pioneering critical history places the movement in its historical setting, relating the individual painters and their art to the larger concerns of 19th-century society. Virtually every Pre-Raphaelite painting is discussed in detail and illustrated here, including works by the best known - Holman Hunt, Rossetti and Millais - and the movement's many minor talents.
At heart, I believe every one of us is creative. It doesn’t matter if you express your creativity through words, notes, metal, wood, food, fabric, or paint. Personally, I love to sketch, paint, write, and sculpt. There is something magical about bringing your imagination to life and sharing it with the world! Our art allows us to share our emotions, dreams, memories, and culture with the world. As a fantasy author, I wanted to create a place where art can transform the physical world too.
If you haven’t read any of Charles de Lint’s stories, you’re in for a treat!
Each of his stories feels so fresh and original. His characters jump off the page… but will also break your heart. This novel is about a young artist named Isabelle Copley (Izzy) whose whimsical paintings seem so real they could come to life. But is her art just… art? The writing is beautiful and lyrical, but also dark and scary.
Memory and Dream is also a great entry into de Lint’s story world of “Newford”.
From her mentor, Rushkin, Isabell Copley had learned to paint creatures that come to life--literally--and years after these creatures have ruined her life, Isabelle returns to painting, haunted by memories, dreams, and the threat of her mentor's return.
Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS
by
Amy Carney,
When I was writing this book, several of my friends jokingly called it the Nazi baby book, with one insisting it would make a great title. Nazi Babies – admittedly, that is a catchy title, but that’s not exactly what my book is about. SS babies would be slightly more…
My name is James Gurney and I've been a professional illustrator for National Geographic and Scientific American for over 40 years. Although I went to art school, everything I know about drawing and painting comes from studying art instruction books, and from sketching directly from nature. I'm best known for writing and illustrating the New York Times bestselling Dinotopia book series, published in 32 countries and 18 languages. I designed 15 dinosaur stamps for USPS and a set of five dinosaur stamps for Australia Post. My originals have been shown in over 35 solo museum exhibitions. My book Color and Light has sold over 200k copies and was Amazon's #1 bestselling book on painting for over a year.
The book covers basic principles, such as variety, shape, silhouette, edges, unity, rhythm, color, and texture. But his coverage of these familiar ideas is fresh and original, and he provides lots of examples. He avoids laying down rules or laws, because one generation of artists breaks the rules of the previous generation. All of the basic principles are universal enough to have remained in place despite the changing styles throughout history.
This is the ENGLISH edition. To buy this book in Russian: https://www.amazon.com/dp/5904957076. | The only textbook on composition approved and recommended by the Russian Academy of Fine Arts. Written by a Head of the Drawing Department and a leading professor of drawing, Vladimir Mogilevtsev. Description: This is the 3rd and last textbook in the series of "Fundamentals of Art". The previous two editions are dedicated to Fundamentals of Drawing and Fundamentals of Painting. In the book Fundamentals of Composition, the author, on the basis of his own creative work and experience working with students, tried to show and explain how…
