Burt Silverman

I am not a great lover of “how to do it” art books, in fact I usually avoid them like the plague; however while search for something else I stumbled across this one and the reviews for the book did tempt me. In fact it does contain some interesting ideas which do go against accepted wisdom, and I will certainly consider adopting some of them.
Yet overall I am not impressed by the book. While it does go into considerable detail on some aspects; namely the type of stock used and how to show more correct errors, this does become rather overstated, while other aspects are seemingly neglected, or mentioned only in passing. For example very little is said about the consistency of the paint employed. What practical information is imparted could be covered in just a few pages, yet one has to read through a lot of irrelevant and rather repetitive background information to find it. I am disappointed too with the quality of the reproduction of both the colour and black and white illustrations. The printing process fails to convey the luminosity of the paint medium, resulting in very dull and flat images, and as a result they are uninspiring. I would have expected better of a book published not really so long ago. show less

VG copy in VG DJ