Title: Creative illustration workshop for mixed media artists
Author: Katherine Dunn
Info: 144 p. - 2010
Finished: 14 May 2011
Acquired through: amazon.com
Rating: 8 / 10
Notes:
This feast on the eyes is wonderfully informative and inspiring too. Dunn is a resourceful artist with a great sense of humor and much sensitivity whose work is just a delight to look at. It's wonderful how she invents stories around the characters that inhabit her paintings and illustrations.
She tells us about her own way of working. She shows how you can process grief by making art, but also how your everyday life and even the mundane things can be transformed into interesting paintings. She gives exercises and ideas on how to incorporate your own ideas and surroundings into your art. Her work varies from drawings to making fun puppets out of her main characters. She succeeds in making me want to be an illustrator right this minute! I think that's the sign of a good artsy book, it makes you want to get to your studio and make stuff right now! ;-)
Even without all the wonderful ideas and insights and her ironic sense of humor (which is really to my liking) the book would still be worth getting, because it is beautifully executed and simply loaded with the most gorgeous art that makes you want to pick it up over and over again just to get a glimpse of the atmosphere. Her art also shows that being able do draw very realistically is not necessarily the most important part of appealing art.
All in all I really loved this book. If I were to say anything negative about it, it would be that I would have liked a few more exercises, but really, in this case that would be nitpicking ;-)