Book Review: CREATURES - Book of Paintings Le Yamamura

山村れぇ (Le Yamamura) is a Japanese freelance concept artist and creature designer. He's known for his beautiful stylised creature designs.

This artbook is a 144-page paperback that features his creature designs. Highlight of the book is easily the huge variety of designs. Most creatures are mixed from different species, e.g. kangaroo with ram horns and thick coat. The creature designs are creative and imaginative, and look so fun.

The drawing style is fluid with the sketchy hand-drawn look and stylised colouring. Bulk of the illustrations are coloured while the last few pages feature line art.

The text is all in Japanese. The designs are accompanied by plenty of notes. There's an interview with the artist with a few pages of tips on designing creatures. It doesn't really matter if you don't know Japanese because you can enjoy this book for the artworks alone.

This is an inspiring artbook that you can flip through quickly to get ideas or get inspired. I can recommend this easily to anyone who loves creature designs

You can see more art from Le Yamamura at
https://www.instagram.com/gomalemo
https://www.artstation.com/goma_lee
https://gomalemo.tumblr.com

And if you like this book and the art style, check out these books too:

• The Art of Spyro: Reignited
• Realistic Pokemon-Volume One Art Book by RJ Palmer
• Fundamentals of Creature Design: How to Create Successful Concepts Using Functionality, Anatomy, Color, Shape & Scale
• Animals Real and Imagined
• The Wildlife of Star Wars
• Principles of Creature Design: Creating Imaginary Animals
• Science of Creature Design: Understanding animal anatomy

CREATURES - Book of Paintings Le Yamaura is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | AU | JP | CN)

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