Book Review: BL8D by Bastien Lecouffe Deharme
Mysterious and evocative art
Bastien Lecouffe Deharme is a French artist with more than 20 years of experience creating concept art and teaching art.
BL8D (blood) is a 432-page A4-sized hardcover artbook that collects the two decades of artworks that includes personal art, client work and sketches. This book is made possible thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign. By the way, there's much nudity included so this is definitely a NSFW artbook.
Here's the contents for the book:
- Bastien (profile)
- Preface
- Art
- Client work
- Retrocity
- Curse
- Gods
- Magic: The Gathering
- Sketches
The book starts of with a preface where you get to learn that Bastien had to make sandwiches and crepes before becoming a concept art, and later an art professor at a local university. I love stories like these because it provides insight to the life and career of the artist. Unfortunately, this book doesn't have much text except for the few short paragraphs before each chapter of the book.
The book is filled with stunning and mesmerising character designs and environments. This guy has impeccable technique. You can see occasional inspiration from Blade Runner and Frank Frazetta.
The illustrations and paintings are extremely detailed with very strong storytelling element. There's a chapter on Retrocity which is a roleplaying game he created based on a French graphic novel published in 2011. There are also artworks for GODS, a dark fantasy tabletop roleplaying game.
Many artists can draw characters with interesting poses. Bastien takes his craft further by making you think about the story behind the character. This combination of technique and storytelling is what separates a good artist from a great artist.
Most of the subject matter belong the to realm of dark fantasy. Even the edges of the pages are coloured black. The book has gold coloured embossed title, binding is excellent and the paper used is low gloss with terrific colour reproduction. All the artworks featured are presented satisfyingly big. The loose sketches look so good as well.
This artbook is priced at €70 and is available from publisher Editions Caudette online store.
You can see more art from Bastien Lecouffe Deharme via these links:
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