Title: Manga to the Max: Robots Subtitle: Drawing and Coloring Book ISBN-13: 978-1-4972-0078-1 Publisher: Design Originals (Fox Chapel Publishing) Author: Erik DePrince Publication Date: 2016 Series: Manga to the Max Price: $9.99 Pagecount: 86 Color: Some Breasts: No Short Impression: Less about drawing and more about finishing (inks, colors) While it starts with the generic How To Draw slug of pages (ball and stick, block shapes, fill in details, add lighting, etc), most of this "coloring book" is a combination of world building and finishing practice. It feels like it was intended to be comb-bound or spiral-bound so that the pages could be taken out, since the details about each mech are on the back of its page rather than on a facing page. Most of the pages feature all or most of the inked linework for a mech (sometimes with a pilot/partner) on front, and then on the back there's the bio note and a piece of the mech done in light gray pencil sketch style. The idea is to color in the front side, and use the back side piece for practice inking the linework. It's also useful as an example of how even professional art can look sketchy at that stage...the usual four-step examples in HTDs tend to have very clean pencil lines. A few of the inked pages are missing pieces and tell you to draw them in yourself, sometimes providing the missing pieces on the back, but not always. If the book has a significant teaching flaw, it's that it treats the coloring exercises as analog (pencils or markers), but the example colors are blatantly computer-colored. It undermines the "this is how it actually looks" part of the pencil work by not showing the sort of thing a buyer could do, implying that such smooth gradients can be obtained with markers (the writer does mention that he usually scans in his line work to color in Photoshop, but that runs counter to the idea of a COLORING BOOK). A few examples of hand-colored pieces would have been nice. Especially a few words of advice on doing highlights after you've already laid down flats. The other main problem with the book is that they don't just print the sample pencils in light gray. Rather, the entire back of each page is printed in light gray, making it difficult to read all the paragraphs of worldbuilding DePrince wrote.