How to Draw Sci-Fi Utopias and Dystopias: Create the Futuristic Humans, Aliens, Robots, Vehicles, and Cities of Your Dreams and Nightmares

This book is not helpful for anyone who is looking for basic structure or guidelines as to how to create these settings from their own imagination. This book is basically a play by play on how the artist drew the pictures and scenes contained in the book. It gives no basic background information on how to draw these things on your own as a novice or even a little more skilled than that. It's a good book for someone who has a detailed knowledge of creating this kind of art prior to reading, to pull different techniques from, but it is not a "how to" by any means. 3 stars simply for the beautiful artwork and minimal teachings contained therein.

Pretty much tells you to use lots of photo reference and inspiration from other artists like Syd Mead. Lots of what it teaches about science fiction is common knowledge and not helpful at all for people who are familiar with the genre. You do not need this book if you observe the works of others on sites like conceptart.org or artstation.com. Wish I realized that before I purchased.

Cool book, very helpful. Happy to have a guide on drawing sci if elements .

good reference material good ideas and helpful tips

Thank you. I love this book. I will be happy to shop with you again. and I'll let my friends know too.

Lot of fun

Confusing drawings (violates the 3-second rule for audience identifying the scene), no line variation, no atmospheric perspective, unimportant details mask important ones, lack of main focal point due to it being lost in the confusing detail. Foreground, middle ground and background all have the same detail and is in focus (even very distant objects). Photobashing is discongruous with the manually created art of photoshop, and this emphasizes the artificial and unnaturalness of the presentation. On the plus side, a concept artist/designer could correct these deficiencies. Therefore this book is for advanced (see what's wrong and correct it), and not beginner level learning (who would not notice the problems with these illustrations). The examples are good from the stand point of work flow stages.

Overall, this is a good book. I was hoping for great--but that always seems to be the case with me!My favorite chapter is actually the first chapter where the author covers some very important basics of drawing such as perspective, the human head/face, the human body, building the figure, clothing, foreshortening, silhouette, light, shadow, and rendering and composition. His illustrations are very good for this chapter--but unfortunately, each area is basically only covered by a couple paragraphs and the information included would not be enough for a beginner to be able to actually learn how to draw many of the things discussed or shown.The rest of the book is labeled as demos--but that could be very misleading if you interpret demos as showing step-by-step directions on how you too could draw the items the author drew. The book doesn't include actually step-by-step guidance. What it does show are numerous stages of the works along with a brief explanation of the steps he took. For example, here are the steps he describes for the three stages on page 48. Top illustration has "Starting to work on the final pencils, this time on a sheet of Bristol board." Second illustration has "Continuing with the pencils--adding the aliens and more details." The last illustration on the page has, "Here's the final pencils, ready for inking."If you are interested in drawing Sci-Fi the author does include a wide range of subject matter (human, aliens & robots, land vehicles, flying vehicles, and cityscapes), and his writing is easy to follow and understand.While it is interesting to see various stages of the work, along with his brief descriptions, I want to repeat that it is NOT a follow along and draw the objects or scenes book.

Worth the read....as with most ,how to books,,,,,it's all about practice

What a book!

Anfang des Jahres zeichnete ich mal wieder an meiner Comic-Serie "Enklave", die auf einer Weltraumstation spielt und so hatte ich auf Empfang geschaltete Antennen, als mir hier auf Amazon dieses Buch vorgeschlagen wurde. Kurz: Prentis Rollins lässt sich vom Leser beim Erstellen diverser SciFi-Zeichnungen über die Schulter linsen – nicht mehr, aber auch nicht weniger! Man begleitet ihn bei diversen Projekten von der ersten Skizze über das Tuschen bis hin zur Kolorierung – die letzten beiden Schritte werden gerne im Programm Photoshop vollzogen.Ich finde alles sehr solide und gut, allerdings reisst mich der Illustrator nicht unbedingt vom Hocker (was aber sehr subjektiv ist). Dem Künstler bei der Arbeit zuschauen, kann man bei YouTube ebenfalls, bewegt und umsonst. Wer mal hinter die Kulissen blicken will, der sollte hier einfach mal nach "Loish" suchen. Wer allerdings etwas im "Blade Runner"-Stil sucht, der wird hier fündig! Ich selbst würde es mir allerdings kein zweites Mal zulegen ...

A great sci fi reference book. The artist shows you the finished piece and breaks it down into stages, from pencil to digital finishing, showing the process he used. The is not a step by step "How to" book, but rather a "This is how I do it" reference, and I am more than ok with that. There are bits and pieces of other related information in here that some may find useful, but not enough new info to really make it valuable.

This book is fun, but reading it doesn't get me anywhere in terms of learning how to draw. THe beginning of the book has some basics on certain things that can be found everywhere, and the majority of the book covers "demos" of art that the author has made. There is no step by step "here's how you actually do this" instruction. The book was cool, but not particularly useful.