Including guides to geeky tattoos, stolen art and manga.
A brilliant new pocket guide to manga art inspired us to seek out the best tools around for those looking to master the form, in this month's round up. We picked out the best quality paper around, and a pack of professional-level pens that won't break the bank.
Elsewhere, we get stuck into modern, illustrative mapmaking – skills that teach you how to draw your favourite places. We look at a new book exploring masterpieces that were lost, stolen and destroyed. We get introspective with an essential text on the self-portrait. Finally, another new release encourages you take on ‘sketch dares’. Let’s get started!
Geek Ink is a tattoo coffee table book with a bit of a difference. Inkstinct is a project that connects 380,000 tattoo studios worldwide. Its new title shows off the best tattoo art that references fantasy and sci-fi themes, maths, science, literature and philosophy, and their creators discuss how they drew them. It's the "definitive tattoo inspiration sourcebook" for geeks.
Noah Charney wrote bestseller The Art of Forgery. For his new book, The Museum of Lost Art, he returns to the art underworld and looks at work that was stolen, looted or destroyed in war. Some pieces featured here were accidentally lost, others damaged in natural disasters, and others still destroyed because of the images they carried. Most remarkable of all are the masterpieces recycled for their materials.
"As every book tells a story, every book in art is part of an intriguing, engaging, and relatable image." In Reading Art: Art for Book Lovers, David Trigg looks into how books in art are used as symbols and subjects in their own right. He considers pieces from museums all over the world in an "homage to both the written word and to its pivotal role in the visual world”. One for both art geeks and bookworms.
In The Art of Map Illustration, four artists guide you through a step-by-step exploration of contemporary cartography and mapmaking. They share their own approaches and techniques, using pen and ink, watercolour, mixed media, and digital processes. They recommended the best tools and materials for drawing intricate maps that tell stories about your favourite cities.
This outdoor sketching kit is put together by ever-reliable brand Derwent, so it's good quality gear, but it won't break the bank. The wallet contains graphite, water-soluble, onyx, and charcoal pencils, plus an eraser, a blender, a sharpener, and an A5 sketchpad: everything you need to get outdoors and get started on your mapmaking. For top tips, take a look at our guide to en plein air painting.
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The Little Book of Manga Drawing contains everything you need to know about how to draw manga. It starts with the fundamentals of the form, basic techniques like heads and bodies and proportions, before moving onto to props, colour, costumes, and storytelling. It contains practice pages, creative exercises, and art prompts, so there's something for artists of every level. A small but comprehensive guide to Japanese comic art.
These Faber-Castell pens are perfect for manga art. They're colourfast and don't bleed or smudge, so they're perfect for character line work. The pack contains a range of blacks and greys, and various tips ranging from rigid to brush-like. A good stepping stone for anyone looking to move towards professional-level pens, but at an affordable price.
If you're going to get stuck into manga art, you need some nice heavyweight paper to work on. Canson is one of the leading brands for comic and manga art paper. This Comic/Manga sketchpad isn't cheap – you only get 50 sheets – but you're paying for quality and, in particular, its all-important resistance to erasing and scraping.
Art book publisher Phaidon has given this classic 80-year-old text a reworking. 500 Self-Portraits has been revised for the first time in two decades. It's been given a smart new cover and layers, but still contains the best self-portraits every produced, across various periods and disciplines, plus essays on what they say about the artists who made them.
Laura Lee Gulledge dares you – she dares you; she double-double dares you – to do things like draw out a feeling, sketch a piece of music, and represent yourself by drawing five objects. There are 24 dares in Sketchbook Dares. Some encourage you to get out and interact with the world around you, while others are more abstract.
Gary Evans is a journalist with a passion for creative writing. He's recently finished his Masters in creative writing, but when he's not hitting the books, he loves to explore the world of digital art and graphic design. He was previously staff writer on ImagineFX magazine in Bath, but now resides in Sunderland, where he muses on the latest tech and writes poetry.
