PROS
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+The book’s construction and page quality is decent.
+The design of the book is very clean and impressive at a glance.
+Contains lots of well-rendered art of characters.
+Captures the creepy sci-fi look very well, and presents a cohesive experience throughout the art book.
+The total page length of the book is a good amount for the price.
CONS
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-A lot of these pieces look like they should be displayed in portrait format instead of sticking with landscape. This makes a chunk of his illustrations feel a little awkward and squashed on the pages.
-He renders long slender machines nicely, but I want a little bit more variety in body shapes and mech occupations coming from a concept artist. To each their own, I suppose.
-I wish the tutorials he included went through his mental process of creating mechs, rather than just creating line art or coloring.
-For someone who has worked in environment art, Chanthara does not showcase many environmental pieces for the viewer in this book. It's a little disappointing.
CONCLUSION
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This book is great, but not perfect. Within the art book, Nivanh provides two tutorials in the back that serve more as a general overview of his process when tackling concept work or illustrations and should not be an end-all-be-all method for tackling all projects. With that in mind, I’m not entirely sure if these tutorials offer anything “unique” or memorable enough to justify not just including more examples of his illustrations instead. In future books, I would love to see some more of these cool-looking mech designs portrayed in the context of situations they would be in. For example if a sniper were to take point on top of a building, how would it get up there? Grappling hook? Some kind of jumping ability? I wish he portrayed how mechs interact with their environment to fulfill their purpose.
Across the board, Chanthara captures the creepy, gritty sci-fi feeling very well as you’d expect from someone that worked on Ghost in the Shell and Deus Ex. But unless you are a die-hard fan of the visual style of either of those series or the creepy-sci-fi-with-skulls aesthetic, I’d maybe think twice about adding this one to your collection since it's admittedly its a very niche genre. I can't say that I regret picking this one up at all, though.
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