Drawing & Painting Fantasy Worlds

This book as wonderful tips on world building and techniques. It does general gloss over on things like techniques, tools of the trade you will employ as a serious artist. I thoroughly enjoyed the overviews of building anatomy and faces in particular. This book isn't a substitution for what experience will get you however and any serious artist needs to fill at least one sketchbook per season and draw everything. And I mean everything. This is a fine book for referencing things however and the author himself outlines exercises that will help you on your way to putting your dreams to paper.For what it is, you will enjoy this book if your looking to get your feet wet in the world creating. How you get there is up to you. Good luck!

This book covers similar ground to Cowan's previous title, Drawing & Painting Fantasy Figures. Both cover traditional and digital media, both explore specific projects and general idea generation, and both discuss studio setup, traditional and digital art submission, and other essentials for artistic survival. It's not a total rehash, but both works complement each other to the point that it's worth your while to read both if you're going to read one. I haven't seen the third book yet (Drawing & Painting Fantasy Creatures, I think is the title), but if it follows suit it, too, will be at its best if considered with Cowan's previous works.

This one has a great tip on drawing cities easy with perspective lines.

I liked the content of the book, very useful and inspiring too.but here are the problemsThe step by step drawing are in 4 inch panels. This makes the drawing very small and unreadable. More so if its a scenery.and recently Impact books are coming with extremely poor printing and paper. My copy has washed out colors and poor contrast. The paper too is dull and bad. I visit a library and so can clearly see the degradation in quality of printing.Good lessons wasted on poor paper.

 If you're interested in learning how to create fantasy art, this book might be for you.To quote from the back cover, it "demonstrates how to draw and paint every possible subject in this exciting genre with both traditional and digital media". Yes it does but unfortunately because of the variety of subjects covered, not all are in depth. For example, it will be best to pick up a book dedicated to anatomy figure drawing. The chapter in this book teaches drawing techniques just enough to get by. Same goes with other chapters.The book however provides lots of ideas and examples on fantasy art. Things like researching, symbolism of characters and archetype, creating costumes and things like that. There are a few step-by-step workflow process tutorials.I've mixed feelings about the book because of the lack of depth in certain areas. It's worth looking through but to really hone your techniques, you might have to get other books.Other fantasy art technique books that I recommend are 100 Ways to Create Fantasy Figures and Fantasy Workshop: Mastering Digital Painting Techniques.(More pictures are available on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)

I have been interested in fantasy drawing, literature for many years. This book is filled with recommendations and examples to help get you thinking and show you what is possible. Once the wheels are turning it is up to you to create. I like seeing the examples of the author's work illustrating his points and also giving fuel to the fires of my imagination.

-To "Drawing and painting fantasy figures" Anyone interested in the subject of fantasy/sci-fi art/storytelling/animation should get both these books. The best thing to come along since "Encyclopedia of fantasy/sci-fi art techniques"