Customer Reviews

The New Complete Illustration Guide: The Ultimate Trace File for Architects, Designers, Artists, and Students

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Evans' book is retread of an early 1980's volume, and most of the book seems to be picked up from the earlier version. There is a lot of clip art, which is now hopelessly outdated (guys in suits, women in dresses, etc.) and should have been deleted. Evans actually had to the gall to title this book "THE NEW" when it is basically a reprint of a hopelessly out-of-date volume. Architectural illustration in this day of advance computer graphics relies heavily on the latest styles of drawing, illustration, fashion, cars etc. and the ancient art techniques and drawings offered here would earmark any illustration as hopelessly dated. Nothing like an illustration of a 15 year-old-car parked in from of a million dollar home to mark you as a hopelessly out-of-touch illustrator. There is a small section of more recent full color illustrations inserted into the black and white remainder, but again, the illustration style, done in early computer graphics, is muddy, dated and not very well done. Any volume claiming to be the "ULTIMATE" should include a CD with vector files of the art for use by the reader/illustrator. Evans must think that there is a large pool of architects out there who are going to forego their slick and beautiful clipart 3-D disks in favor of scanning in Evans' dated art as a bitmap and trying to work them into their renderings. Most of the text seems to have been picked up verbatim from the 1980's edition, and describes illustration techniques in terms of t-squares, triangles, pencil lines and ink! Computer graphics doesn't seem to even exist in this edition! Despite, the gee-whiz cover color illustration, this edition is a tired, out-of-date reprint turkey that should never have seen daylight -- the publisher and Evans should both be ashamed to have put out this edition. The hype on the cover is totally inacurate and borders on false advertising. Stay clear of this one.

The book's contents are very useful & helpful to me. I like the drawings of people presented in different scales & sizes. Colored figures are also helpful because it saves me time to think of what color to put on clothings & cars for my drawings. There are various vehicles in different angles/ views that I found very useful for most of my illustration. I strongly recommend this book to all illustrators whether they're beginners or professionals because it's the best book that I've ever used.