You Can Draw Transformers ISBN: 978-0-7566-2746-1 Publisher: DK Publishing (Dorling Kindersley) Author: Simon Furman, with Guido Guidi Publication Date: March 2007 Series: You Can Draw (no relation to AP's series of the same name) Price: $19.99/$24.99Cn Pagecount: 96+ Color: Lots Breasts: No Short Impression: Another "all levels in little depth" book, but with some extra technical aspects that are helpful. An overview of characters from most eras of Transformers, although focused on what Furman likes. Simon Furman is credited with all the writing, and Guido Guidi with all the art, but that's not quite true. First, a lot of "archival" art is included from various licensed works (mostly IDW, some Dreamwave or even other works). Second, individual pages sometimes have their own art and writing credits, like Marcelo Matere on pages 28-29 or Nick Roche on page 31. Most of these secondary credits seem to be set off in "Tips" boxes, but the contributors are not mentioned in the front matter. They do get props in the Acknowledgements on the very last page, though. It's not clear if the Tips boxes are just written contributions, or if the artists drew the work accompanying them. Unlike most How To Draws I've bought, this one uses several technical tricks to enhance the lessons. It's spiral bound (with a shield over it on the outside connected to the covers) so it can lie flat. There's tracing paper pages every so often that let you overlay two stages of the same drawing, such as rough pencils and inks. Also, several pages are fold-outs to give more attention to a particular lesson. Unfortunately, the tracing paper and fold-outs don't always interact properly...the Optimus Prime tracing sheet doesn't line up correctly with either page 39 or 41 (and, oddly, the pages are numbered in reverse of the order you'd read them). The first half of the book covers various penciling techniques. Like all too many How To Draws, however, it tries to be all things to all people. The basic lessons are too short to help a beginner, and having them there at all is wasted space for non-beginners. Meanwhile, the more advanced stuff is presented too quickly to help anyone but the expert. It makes for a visually interesting book for a non-artist, but is less than helpful to someone seeking to learn. The second half goes into examples from each of the eras Furman chooses to cover. They're a mix of reference pictures, "three steps to completion" examples, and general notes about theme, style and composition. This section doesn't try so hard to be "all audiences", and is more useful to the middle or upper level artist. The two page sections are: Generation 1 (general), Dinobots & Insecticons, Combiners (Devastator), Unicron, Beast Wars: Maximals (mostly focusing on references for real animals), Beast Wars: Predacons (ditto), Armada & Minicons (mostly the same pics that showed up in every DK Armada book), Energon, and Cybertron (mainly the crappy package art), Stormbringer (no new art at all). The section finishes with a Megatron spread essentially the same as the Prime one from earlier, complete with bad lining up between fold-outs and tracing page. It wraps up with a few more "all levels" sections on inking, coloring and general comic book construction. Given how much fan art is colored directly on computer these days, it's odd that they even have a page on paints and colored pencils. In fact, aside from an early mention at the start of the pencils chapter, there's really nothing about computer coloring. At the very end of the book is a removable template page for speech balloons. Given how generic it is, I suspect it's something they intend to include in any comic-type You Can Draw book. There's a number of TF-specific speech bubble shapes not included in it, for instance. Anyway, it's a little better than most "all things to all levels" How to Draw books, especially with the overlays and process tips. But it still has all the usual flaws of that kind of book, and lacks sufficient references to help the more advanced artist.