Book Review: Ray Toh's Ideabook 2011

Here's an advance copy of a sketchbook from my artist friend, Ray Toh (aka torei).

The unique design is from Jasmine from You & Me. It has a brown cardboard cover and 200 pages inside are brown as well. It comes with a customised wooden pencil that you can remove from the book spine. It's quite costly to get it printed but the result looks great. It's a cardboard cover so be careful of wrinkles from bending it — mine has a few already.

The Ideabook is a collection of sketches Ray did over the years, for conceptualising and exploring ideas. They are mainly character designs. The style is quite loose since they are at the drafting stage, with a couple with more details. It's interesting to look through the character sketches, some of them can be further developed and I wonder if they were. It would be cool to see them fully coloured and realised, maybe the next book.

This book will be available for sale at Singapore Toy, Games and Comic Convention 2011 on 20-21 August 2011, booth G24. I'm not sure how much he's going to price it yet. Another book on sale is Ray Toh: Voyage which he published previously.

The book is available for sale on his website.