Book Review: The Art of Carbon Grey

Carbon Grey is a project started by Hoang Nguyen in 2002. It's only in 2011 that the first comic book book got published. Since then, three issues have been published, and subsequently a trade paperback volume 1. This art book collects some of the art from those three issues.

The art is spectacular. They come in the form of comic pages, together with the layout sketches, and inked line art just before colouring.

The comic panels are all hand painted, and the result looks amazing. The colours, textures, composition and action all work wonderfully together. There are three artists working together, the other two are Khari Evans and Kinsun Loh.

If you already have the comic books, then you would have seen the comic art already, except they are printed slightly larger in this book. The extras you're getting with this book are the layout sketches, additional character designs. a tutorial of an illustration, and interviews regarding the creation of Carbon Grey. The extras make up for more than half the book so it's still a good deal.

Hoang Nguyen has a Carbon Grey Kickstarter campaign which has just ended on 14 April 2012 successfully. That means there's going to be a Volume 2 trade paperback. He has actually posted the first issue of his comic up as a PDF download, and you must definitely download that to check out more of his art. You must also watch the video he posted as a download on one of his updates - it's awesome and it's in HD.

Great book. Recommended to fans and comic artists.

The Art of Carbon Grey HC is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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