Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Imaginative Realism - highly recommended

This is rather later than I anticipated, but you can now read my Book Review - Imaginative Realism by James Gurney on Making A Mark reviews......

It gets a HIGHLY RECOMMENDED rating from me and this comment
This long time artist and author produces what he wants to do the way he wants to do it. He's writing about what he knows, he writes from a position of many years expertise and he shares an absolutely amazing amount of content and material.

It's very important to note that, at a time when many publishers of art instruction books are finding yet more ways to regurgitate existing content that they've already paid for into yet another format or cover, James Gurney confounds all the myths about the publication of art books.
  • He tackles complex topics - and renders them easy to understand.
  • He creates a book which appeals to those starting out and those who are experienced in this field.
  • He packs a huge amount of information into one book rather than delivering a publication which is very thin in content terms.
  • He tackles traditional concepts without any sense of the 'same old same old'.
This is emphatically NOT a book which is just for artists involved in fantasy and fictional art. Anybody involved in figurative art and portraying subject matter in a realistic way - even when imagined - will find it very useful. It also has a very good section on composition which alone makes the book a good buy!

This is what James Gurney (Gurney Journey) had to say about the book earlier in the year
This is the main project I’ve been working on during the last year. The material comes from my art school lectures and also from this blog. The reason I wrote the book—and this blog—is that there’s a lot of information that I think is crucial to imaginative picturemaking but I’ve never been able to find it in how-to art books.

Adapting material from a blog into a book turned out to be a much, much bigger job than I first imagined!
Link to book review:
Links to previous mentions of the book on this blog

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