Customer Reviews

Astonishing Fantasy Worlds: The Ultimate Guide to Drawing Adventure Fantasy Art

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With an outstanding career as art instructor, Christopher Hart has released another theme specific book for those interested in fantasy. Christopher provides sections on Barbarians, Vikings, the medieval world, wild things, the enchanted faerie realm, and gothic characters. Within each topic, he further breaks down the genres into types. For instance, the Faerie Realm is divided into Faerie creature, female and male faerie face, fabulous faerie wings, sensational faeries, faerie details, and the faerie world.

He does not leave much untouched. What I really appreciate about Mr Hart's books is his inclusion of not only finished examples, but also the construction of a figure/character from rough circular sketches to a sometimes colored image.

This book, when added to the other Hart tomes, forms a marvelous collection essential to the library of anyone interested in illustration.

www.watsonguptill.com

Tim Lasiuta

If you enjoy fantasy art like myself, this is the book for you. This is not just about drawing fantasy art, but as in many of Hart's books, it is about maximizing artistic skills, and make the most of techniques; such as dramatic lighting, character design scene composition,
It's a great book, deep, comprehensive, yet easy to follow steps which allow you to draw the most interesting fantasy characters. Filled with examples arranged by type (Barbarians, Vikings, many ferry types and of course the vampires as well the many more. The attention to detail in the hundred of examples helps create the atmosphere the scene as the artist sees it. I highly recommend this wonderful book

When the cover of a how to draw book is done by a different artist than the author I believe you have to be suspicious of quality of the product you're about to purchase. In fact I'd say that most of the better looking art in this book is from collaborating artist who are much better than Christopher Hart and never explain their methods or ideas.

All you really get when you buy this is the Hart methodology which boils down to the first chapter in Loomis's book Figure drawing for all it's worth. In fact I'd recommend the Loomis books over anything written by Hart. The text in this book is very simplistic, the art is very basic cartooning (except for some very detailed pieces by Julius Gopez and a few other artists) and the colors are very basic palettes.

I'd recommend buying a book of Frazetta's work, the above mentioned Loomis book or how to draw comics the Marvel way. Those books will teach you more basic skills which can be applied to fantasy art rather than showing you some simple cartoons of barbarians and faeries.