50 Robots to Draw & Paint
Subtitle: Create fantastic robot characters for comics, computer games
     and graphic novels
ISBN-10: 0-7641-3310-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-7641-3310-7
Publisher: Barron's/Quarto 
Author: Keith Thompson (with other artists)
Publication Date: 2006
Series: Barron's Educational Series
Price: $21.99
Pagecount: 128
Color: Full
Breasts: No
Short Impression: No transforming robots, but a useful general guide.  
     Geared towards fully electronic artists.

     In marked contrast with the previous book, while this one has the
occasional mention of manual art techniques, it's clearly written from the
ground up for people who use tablets to draw and Photoshop (or Gimp, etc) to
finish.  Now, I should say here that I do not use computer art techniques,
and I may never learn them...I draw because I like to, not because I hope to
break into the industry.  But, if you hope to become a professional artist
(by which I mean in this case, one who gets hired to do work, rather than one
who does work and then tries to sell it), you really REALLY need to learn
Photoshop.  In a transition almost as abrupt as the abandonment of slide
rules in the late 1970s and early 1980s, professional art has all but
abandoned paper and pencil in favor of work that doesn't see hardcopy unless
you send it to the printer.
     Anyway, this book is definitely aimed at people who are already passable
at general art and at the use of computer tools.  There's a few pages about
"traditional tools", and occasional mentions of hardcopy art techniques, but
that's it.  Most of the teaching advice is the sort of thing that's specific
to robots (like textures you're likely to need, how to draw joints, how to
highlight mechanical parts, etc).  However, that doesn't mean this book will
be useless to a hardcopy artist...I especially like how the primitives stage
of a given design is usually shown from three angles of rotation about the
vertical axis, to help better give an impression of where all the pieces have
to be in relation to each other.  The design process pages at the start of
each section are also good, for showing the thoughts that go into choosing
the look for a robot.
     There's three main subdivisions to the book.  The Introduction has all
the basic boilerplate sort of stuff about art techniques in general, the sort
of thing I talk about way up at the beginning of this file.  Nuts and Bolts
goes into some more robot-specific techniques, including starting with a
basic framework for a robot and a basic weapon and then showing multiple
variations on the themes for different jobs.  The Robot Foundry, however,
takes up the bulk of the book.
     Each figure in the Foundry comes with a bit of backstory that explains
what it's for and helps justify design elements.  These stories aren't all
from the same setting, but some of them share aspects (like the quartet of
alternate WWII walker mechs and the Elektrograd, or the Victorian clockwork
mechs).
     The Foundry opens with Basic Robots, fifteen "simpler" forms that are
presented with triple-view primitives, rough pencils, shaded tight pencils,
and rendered.  The rough pencils step sometimes ends up a bit on the tight
side, but these bots are more likely than the later ones to have rougher
intermediate stages shown.  Each of these bots gets a single page.
     The other subsections are Military Robots, Urban Robots, Law and Order
Robots, and Assistant Robots.  These tend to skip right from primitives to
very tight pencils, then shaded pencils and a second fully rendered picture
with some notes on it to add to the full sized pic.  These robots get two
pages each, with more extensive notes and often inset magnified views of
significant parts.
     Tone for the robots ranges from the goofy retro to gorepunk cyborgs and
steamtech automata, a pretty wide range to pick from.  There's no explicitly
transforming mecha in here, but plenty to work with for inspiration in robot
modes.  The WWII mechs all look like transformed tanks to some extent as well
(although the Panzerfluch's got a bit of an error on his page...mirror-flop
of the primitives, oops).
     An index rounds out the book, a welcome addition not often seen in this
sort of book.