This is a book which teaches artists techniques involved in rendering our ideas into reality through the use of techniques and methods accrued over the years. He teaches us about composition, idea generation and finalization, different sub-genres of imaginative art, and how to tackle drawings. He even goes back in time and analyzes paintings and the methods used back then to achieve their vision.

It shows that good art is well thought out and effort must be made to produce stellar art pieces. It also shows art is methodical and pedantic and is not just about talent but hard work and attention.

The book, while dated in some sections, teaches us some invaluable things. He goes into great detail by teaching us methods of making preliminary drawings and also experimenting with our composition and lighting. He teaches us how to decompose our drawings into various components and even further deconstructing those deconstructions and using a combination of references, imagination, and experimentation to build up the final image.

While his art is stellar, his methods are a bit dated I feel. He recommends constructing models in real life and tearing things apart. He also talks about how hard references are to find. But in the age we are in, one of 3D models and endless resources on the internet, it would be quite a waste of time to go these routes unless they are more easily achievable or absolutely essential (which in most cases they are not).

Some other parts of the book were also not entirely useful to me as he kept going on about maquettes. Even though I’m still a beginner and not at the level of creating such realism that would require perfection, I understand the drive to model things in the real world to get the slightest details right such as fossil shadows in the Sahara desert. Still, I don’t see myself using them anytime soon.

Some important lessons I learned are:

  1. Learn to deconstruct scenes into components ( even recursively).

  2. Experimentation is very important. Don’t give in to tunnel vision.

  3. Research, even literary forms are important when drawing, be it understanding the history behind a civilization we are trying to recreate or understanding how fire engines work to make a Dinotopian one.

  4. Most designs are derivatives.

  5. Drawing scenes is a way to truly appreciate, understand and digest the world while building our observation skills.
    Towards the end, he kept veering into different topics which while related under the general umbrella of composition, felt out of place and like fillers. I felt like I was out of the general flow and narrative of this book which had now turned into reference material.

Overall I give this book a 3/5. The concepts at the beginning were really eye-opening for me as a beginner. The concepts explored just after were heavily focused on things not easily doable for amateurs like making maquettes, hiring models or tearing apart things but I was still able to extract some useful information.

I’ll definitely be coming back to this book to relearn the composition tools he shared.

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SOME POWERFUL QUOTES FROM THE FOREWORD

“Study more than art. Learn about history, drama, astronomy, archaeology, and music, and let it all feed your art. Art grows better in rich soil.”

“Without untiring diligence, single-mindedness, and a combative spirit, there can’t be any good result. All this talk about ‘inspiration’ is nonsense.
Anything that we imagine can be transformed, through love and effort, into a visually convincing truth. But even as we strive for verisimilitude, it really is the invisible quality of believability that we are ultimately striving for. The only thing that’s true about anything is the spirit of it.”