7 Illustration Books You Need to Read
There are a lot of Illustration Books out there.
The problem is, they’re not all as valuable as the covers might make you think.
So, Escape From Illustration Island is highlighting this list of 7 Amazing Illustration Books You Need to Read, to save you from having to sift through the pile to get to the good stuff. Everything on this list, in no particular order, is a great resource for Illustrators looking to expand their knowledge or starting from scratch. A few of these choices are for specific niche markets, but most of them will be of great value to anyone in the Illustration field.
See a book you’d like to read?
You can find them all in the EFII Bookstore, so you can purchase them now and help make EFII one of the best Illustration resources online, or bookmark it and put it on your Holiday Wish List.
You can also add your favorite books to the comments section of this post to share them with your fellow creators here at EFII.
Enjoy the selection!
Breaking Into Freelance Illustration
If author Holly DeWolf’s appearance on Episode 10 of the Escape From Illustration Island Podcast didn’t convince you to buy this book, then you weren’t paying attention. This resource leaves no stone unturned when it comes to starting your career as a freelance Illustrator and lets you in on everything you weren’t taught in art school.
2010 Artist’s and Graphic Designer’s Market
Build your contact list and learn how to submit to over 1,500 art markets with the latest version of this book, which includes interviews with artists and art buyers as well as tips on promotion and networking.
Pricing and Ethical Guidelines
This resource from the Graphic Artists Guild falls into the “must-have” category of Illustration Business books because it gets down-and-dirty with industry standard practices and rates. I still use this one just about every time I’m quoting a price on a new project. Read my previous review of this book here.
Artist Burne Hogarth produced a whole series of books covering his “dynamic” approach to drawing, and this is the best place to start. If nothing else, this will be the least dry and boring book on the subject you’ll ever read, and you will learn how to make realistic figures that leap off of the page.
Writing with Pictures – How to Write and Illustrate Children’s Books,
There’s no better resource on writing and illustrating Children’s Books than this old chestnut by Uri Shulevitz. The fact that nobody has been able to produce a better book on the subject over the years is due in part to the author’s thorough, step-by-step outline of the process of visual storytelling.
Digital Character Painting Using Photoshop CS3
Don’t let the title fool you. This book will show you how to use any version of Photoshop to create stunning Character Illustrations from start to finish. This great resource begins with an overview of the art of character design and doesn’t let up until it has empowered you with the tools and knowledge that you hoped to get out of it.
Jon Hodgson, Fantasy Artist and cohost of the Ninja Mountain Podcast recently released this resource for those looking to dive into the world of Fantasy Art, covering both the theory and practice of the techniques used to create captivating Illustrations for the Fantasy market. If you like Jon’s work, you’ll love this new resource.
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One of my all time favorites is “How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way”. It’s a little dated but still a great book. I recommend it to all my students… I’m pretty sure you can still find it over on Amazon.
Thanks Bob! That’s another great one, and I did find it over at Amazon here.
Burne Hogarth’s books are fantastic, my favourite one of his is ‘Drawing Dynamic Hands’. I’ve found hardly any books dedicated to drawing hands (let alone, good books), which is odd because they’re so difficult to draw but such a crucial thing to know. He takes it further, and instead of being a book about drawing any old boring hands, his hands are expressive and full of character.
A good one I can think of is for any artist who has doubts about their work or is otherwise feeling unmotivated, uninspired or just not good enough: Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. It’s a good read if you often find yourself getting frustrated or feeling unsure when it comes to making art.
At ConceptArt.org, whenever somebody swings by and asks, ‘I’m feeling unmotivated and uninspired, what do I do?’ they will get a swift reply telling them to read this book!
Oh, and I also must buy a copy of Holly’s book!
While not strictly books on illustration…
“Art and Fear: Observations On The Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking” by David Bayles and Ted Orland. It’s a good read, especially during anytime you find yourself in a slump in your drawing.
“Understanding Comics” by Scott Mcloud. A lesson in understanding sequential storytelling, and an enjoyable read.
After reading your suggestion and a few quick google searches I ordered Art & Fear it seems just what I should be reading right now.
Excellent choices – if I’d had some of these back when, it would have shaved about 10 years off my struggle to get noticed. And I still have my nose in some of them today. Nice selection.
–Duncan
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Freelance illustrator for HarperCollins, PS Publishing, Pocket Books, Solomon Press, American Media, Fort Ross, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and many other publishers. See my illustrations at: http://DuncanLong.com/art.html
Hogarth’s instruction books have always left me cold. Like Bridgeman before him, Hogarth’s personal style so overwhelms the content of the lessons he’s trying to impart that Hogarth’s books in general have become more artifacts– stunning examples of personal work, replete with his hyperanatomically distended figure drawing and berserkowitz musculature– than practical guides. I’d advocate for Andrew Loomis’ books, instead; while his style is no less powerful, his instructional work is clear and unencumbered by the overwhelming hand of his professional illusatration work (which is still poresent in his books as his samples or examples, just intimidating enough to get you worked up but clear enough to give you something you think you might be able to achieve, given eternity). Though his stuff is out of print and expensive when you find it, some intrepid soul has posted all the Loomis books online and printable as PDFs. Go find ‘em.
Thanks for sharing your viewpoint, Steven. It’s always great when there are multiple sources of information, since different approaches resonate with different people when learning a skill. Andrew Loomis is another great teaching artist.
I recently purchased The Uri Shulevitz book to give some insight into a dummy book project I was asked to help out on. There’s a lot of good info in there about page design for illustrated children’s books as well as helping you understand the physical making of a book.
If you are like me and have worked as a graphic designer doing multi-page documents (like catalogs or magazines) for a while, some of this info will seem pretty basic to you, but there are still some tidbits of knowledge you can pick up even in those discussions.
Even though this one was written before the “desktop publishing” revolution, principles of design — applied to an illustration itself, or the page on which it appears, or the combination of both — will always apply.
Thanks for the list, Thomas. A couple of those books are already on my Christmas wish list!
Thanks for sharing your take on the Writing with Pictures book. It has a great balance of basic and more advanced information. I hope Santa gets you a couple of these for XMas.
I wonder what books everyone reads for motivation. What do you look at on days when you just don’t want to sit at the art table and work. What makes you get back at the table or opening the sketchbook again.
Looking at other people draw or paint usually inspires me, as well as already finished works.
Invisioning slight or dramatic changes to another’s art-such as a mental swap of colors/setting ect., helps me to better picture my own work.
I find that the happier a mood I’m in, the more focus I can put in.
One of the best books I’ve ever read on illustration is called Rockwell on Rockwell: How I Make a Picture. It’s out-of-print now, but still available through Amazon. It’s worth the price for the information Norman Rockwell gives on his illustration process.
I’m currently reading Inside the Business of Illustration by Steven Heller & Marshall Arisman (http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781581153866-2). It’s mix of interviews with seasoned pros, general guidelines, ans sensible advice. The authors are a creative director and an experienced illustrator, so I would guess they know what they are talking about. My girlfriend couldn’t beleive i was trying to become an illsutrator and never read it.
Besides jut focusing on business as the tittle suggests, the discussions also delve into the philosophy of illustration, and why we do what we do.
So far I like Arisman’s advice for building a strong portfolio that he give right out the bat on page 6: make a list of things you know really well, and make portfolio pieces off based of that. It’s shortcut to forgetting about style and audience, and just creating excellent, sincere work.
I’ll let you all know how the rest of the book is when I’m done.
One of the most dog eared books on my shelf is “The Business of Creativity” by Cameron S. Foote. I don’t know if it has been updated recently but it’s a great resource nonetheless. Another must have is “Business and Legal Forms for Illustrators” by Tad Crawford
Thanks so much Scott. Those both look like valuable resources. I’ll definitely have to check those out.
Steven, I was preparing to share the same opinion regarding Burne Hogarth and Andrew Loomis..
I struggled with Hogarth for years before realizing the problem with his work is exactly what you pointed out; it’s more personal and stylized, and even more, his figures feel like puppets draped in distorted positions- few of them in what I would call natural poses.
But I would say that Bridgeman would be a must have for me.. Not for surface anatomy, but for understanding the mechanics of the body .
Also as you pointed out, I keep recommending Loomis as the one stop shop for honestly learning anatomy and drawing. He focuses on the surface anatomy and the planes of the body, which you need complete understanding to draw and paint.
I also would round out this selection with James Gurneys book on fantasy illustration, similar John Hodgson’s. And I would say that Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud(sp?) is a must have- even if you never plan on doing mainstream comics, its exposition about the mechanics of storytelling can be applied to many other industries.
Tariq.
I do have to give up the neccessary props to Bridgman–especially his “Book of 100 Hands,” and I realized as much as his personal style overwhelmed his stuff for me, is nevertheless indeed, as Tariq says, exceptional in its clarity. I am a fan of his “Complete Guide To Drawing From Life,” reissued by an outfit called Wings Books. I realize, too, that even in the materials I used in my own teaching on the college level, I had a preference for the old stuff, as reflected in much of my own collection. The exquisite “Willy Pogany’s Drawing Lessons”; Gene Byrnes’ “Complete Guide To Drawing Illustration Cartooning and Painting”; the Watson (later of Watson-Guptill) Pencil Drawing and Pen and Ink Drawing volumes; Don Graham’s superlative “Composing Pictures”; Loomis, of course; and of course the old standby, Kimon Nicolaides “The Natural Way To Draw” (how can you not love a book that says, after a chapter, “Now draw for 12 hours”?) all still manage to fill me with the magic of inspiration (as well as woeful feelings of inadequacy) to this day. Go search out the used book sites! Hell, go hit up the used book STORES in your neighborhood! Don’t spend thru the nose for a pristine copy of Loomis’ FIGURE DRAWING FOR ALL IT’S WORTH or any of these others when that stinky copy laying all beat up on the back shelf of that scary old book store in the bad neighborhood’ll only set you back a sawbuck!
Any book by Andrew Loomis. Well written books if you can find them or afford them. “Creative illustration” is one of his finest. It’s loaded with the fundamentals of drawing, composition, perspective and color.
Thanks alot Thomas for your show and blog.
Marvin
Here they are, several sites offering PDFs of several different Loomis books. DL times vary from site to site, go for the fastest DL, or page thru the PDFs on the sites, but soak up these gems at your own pace.
http://fineart.sk/index.php?cat=13
http://www.placidchaos.com/AM/index.php/2006/02/21/andrew_loomis
http://alexhays.com/loomis/
Thanks Steven! Those are incredible resources. I’ll feature them in this week’s Resource Review to help spread the word.
Cheers,
Thomas
There’s also Mark Simons’ Facial Expression books. Page after page of photos of people making faces. My favorite part of the book (I only have the first, haven’t picked the one up of younger subjects yet) is the range of facial types and ages. A lot to learn from.
Facial Expressions: A Visual Reference for Artists
Facial Expressions Babies to Teens: A Visual Reference for Artists
Those Loomis books are fantastic, I was super stoked a year or so back when I stumbled onto the pdf downloads.
Just read the The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. She’s a choreographer, but there was some useful info on finding creative inspiration and creativity exercises that translate to illustration.
Also chiming in on the incredible value of Andrew Loomis’s work. I stumbled upon some websites that carried PDF’s of his instructional material, and although they were created in the 30′s & 40′s, they are just as useful today as when they were written. Many of my art instructors insisted on Hogarth’s books for studying anatomy, however for reasons outlined above by other posters, they did not speak to me at all.
Loomis’s lessons made me want to pick up a pencil and draw. After studying his work, I saw huge improvements in my renderings of figures, faces & hands within a very short time. Unfortunately his books are out of print – artists regularly pay hundreds of dollars on e-bay to get beaten-up copies. I recommend trying to ferret out PDF’s online – although they are often taken down due to copyright infringement issues. For some reason Loomis’s surviving family will not publish new editions of his books, which is a shame because they would continue to sell like hotcakes!
Just bought Holly DeWolf’s book and I can say it’s well work the money great book!
Thanks for the feedback, William. Glad you found it useful!
Out of all the books that I own for Freelance, The most used (every year) is my copy of The Artist and Graphic Designers Market Place. My wife has devoted a space on our Bookshelf to just that book and the many copies I have.
I look forward, with my Highlighter in hand to November when the Updated Volume comes out.
James Gurney’s book Imaginative Realism should be #1 on this list!!!
I wish I’d had this book 15 years ago and would have needed art school….just kidding, but it’s a great addition to have on the list.
Thanks for the feedback, Jeff. Always nice to hear from someone who’s familiar with one of the books.
I would Definitively add “Creative Illustration” by Andrew Loomis.