Saturday, September 3, 2011

100 Ways to Create Fantasy Figures - By Francis Tsai


Time for another book review (yaaaaay...). This is yet another book from the company Impact, which is surprising because I suppose that means they have a fairly good line up of published books... 100 Ways to Create Fantasy Figures is written by and uses illustrations from Francis Tsai.

Now first off: Is this book good for beginners? Not entirely. It's more of an "inspiration" book to be honest. It does cover some basics in the beginning and he does elaborate how he creates his creatures and why he chooses colours. However it will not tell you everything about anatomy, explain how a structure stands or anything really detailed. It does give some proportion for fantasy figures in the beginning of the book and it also reminds one self of the all important word of "Studying and Practice" (Words that many people seem to choose to forget about or choose to trap in a basement). So it's more of a "This is what I'm doing, try and keep this in mind when you create something" kind of book. Now is that bad? No. I actually enjoy it. It does give me ideas of what I should be thinking of when I create a creature or even an environment.

Alright so what else is there to this book? Lovely drawings, good elaborations of the artists thought process, basic tutorials and it points out the importance of the process. Now I have a strange feeling this will be a very short review compared to my other reviews (which would mean this is terribly short...) mainly because this book is fairly easily summed up. Would I say that beginners absolutely need it to improve themselves? Not really. There are tons of books about anatomy, colour and composition that do a better job of teaching it than this book. But I feel that this is something someone could use to help them gain ideas and to be reminded about how important it is to think about what you are drawing and how it works.

Which in summary means: This is a good book for budding concept artists. You have anatomy pretty well done? You understand colour pretty well? My oh my, this book might be something you can invest in order to have reminders and to get ideas from. Which to me is important for any artist. You can't be a good illustrator or concept artist without having "Ideas" or "Thoughts." For you see, as much as you are ordered around by others you are also expected to think of ideas within the topic that sets you apart from other people (or so I have been told) and this book sort of allows you to think more about what you are drawing and how it will work in real life if it really existed.

So that was a short review. I hope you enjoyed reading this and didn't get to big of a headache. Just to recap though: This book is good for a budding concept artist. <- Make sense to you? I hope so. God I hope so. So you can find this book either to the left of just click here.


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