Book Review: Qu Draws A Year

Submitted by  Teoh Yi Chie on  January 3, 2020 - 9:57 am

Qu Draws A Year - 03

Qu Draws A Year is a mightily impressive 800-page artbook from illustrator Qu Tianran (天然). The book's about palm size but really thick.

This book collects one and a half year's of work, dating from 6 Dec 2017 to 31 Dec 2018. Just to be clear, she created all the artworks in this 800-page book with 390 days. That's incredible to the point of mind blowing. This lady is prolific.

The artworks featured look like quick or speed paintings but they look good. They are not really detailed but the masterful use of composition, colours and details when appropriate really makes each piece a work of art.

Most of the artworks are in portrait vertical format. That's quite unusual to me because artworks I see are mostly in landscape horizontal format. So it's quite refreshing to me to see what Qu has managed to do with the vertical format. There may be things you can use from her use of composition and colours.

This book is unfortunately not easy to purchase because the book is available on Taobao.com where all the text is in Chinese. The other place to get it will through Basheer Graphic Books, the local bookstore here in Singapore.

At the time of this review, the book is priced at 112 RMB (around S$22) on Taobao and S$38 from Basheer Graphic Books. Prices do not include shipping.

Check out more of Qu's art at
https://www.instagram.com/qu.draws/
https://www.instagram.com/qu.comics/
https://qudraws.myportfolio.com/
https://twitter.com/DrawsQu
https://www.behance.net/qudraws

Qu Draws A Year - 01

Qu Draws A Year - 02
The book is shipped with thick foam protection.

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The book is stitched in such a way that the pages can be opened flat. There's a piece of paper with art over the exposed spine.

I was told by the author that those are CMY colour plates of random pages from the book. Each book will have a different spine design.

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Qu Draws A Year - 15

Tags
art book reviews
basheer sponsored

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