Book Review: Royal London Sketchbook by John Cleave

Royal London Sketchbook uses the same presentation from the other travelogue style sketchbooks published by Editions Didier Millet. It's a large 96-page hardcover with beautiful artworks accompanied by handwritten font which are thankfully quite legible.

The author John Cleave is an architectural photographer and the writer and researcher is journalist Roger Williams.

Unlike other the travelogue sketchbooks from EDM, the "sketches" here are actually artworks created from photographs. If you look closely, you can definitely identify the photographs because of all the details, textures and the perfection of lines capture. With hand drawn or painted art, you just can't achieve this level of detail. However, the photographs are treated to have a more painterly look. It makes you do a double take when you look at the artworks or photographs. It's not just applying a Photoshop filter over the photos and calling it a day. The results do look good.

Many of the photos were given the watercolour treatment where parts of the painting are not coloured completely and fades to white. There are certain areas where "line sketches" were not coloured. The style is definitely inspired by watercolour but the end result is not exactly watercolour. It's interesting style.

The text talks about history and significance of the places and buildings around London. This is a city extremely rich in history and there's a lot of interesting things to read and learn about.

This is a pretty good book.

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This review copy is provided by book seller and distributor APD Singapore (website | facebook). You can get the book from them and major bookstores in Southeast Asia.

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