Graphic L.A. Paperback – Illustrated, 31 July 2018

Excellent

Good little book, a lot of the images are a little underworked

As a cocnept artist and a huge fan of Robh, I have to say this little book is a rare gem and full of helpful tips and absolutely worth every penny!

The media could not be loaded.  I started following Robh Ruppel's art ever since I learned that he was behind the art direction of Uncharted 2. Back then, I was mesmerised by the staging and composition of the game's environment art from  The Art of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves  artbook. Robh Ruppel has a way of framing scenes such that they always look so inviting. So it's great to see this new book from him.Many of the artworks in Graphic L.A. have appeared previously on his blog The Broadview Blog. There are additional art as well as many sketches included. The drawn subjects are mostly urban scenes from Los Angeles, hence the title of the book.In Graphic L.A., Robh Ruppel adopts a more graphical approach to creating his illustrations. The emphasis is on breaking down scenes into geometric shapes and symbols, focus on getting the correct tonal values, and then working with that in mind to create a graphic representation of a scene. It's sort of similar to how some watercolour artists think about shapes for their paintings.The artworks are stylised and beautiful. There's even a vector quality to his artworks that is characterised by sharp edges. The colour scheme is very tastefully done. The paintings remind me of photographs that are treated with some colour filters, or those from old school film cameras. This more vector-like style with strong symbolism is a departure from his other painterly style, which you can see in his earlier artbook Aspect Ratio and older works from his blog's archive.There are quite a few sketches included and they are experimentation and exploration of values, shapes and silhouette. They remind me of another book Framed Ink which also touts the importance of having good value design.Where the book falls short would be in the area of instructions and insight. The use of white space is usually plastered by tips in large typefaces. There are good tips as well as vague tips that could do with more elaboration. Some of the insightful information that I read on his blog are not in the book. I wished there could be more shared on techniques, and especially on how he thinks about colour schemes.It's a beautiful artbook. I enjoy looking at how other artists use composition to frame their drawings, in this case Robh Ruppel is a master at doing so.(See more pictures of the book on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)

There's hardly any text in this compact, square-format little paperback book, just simple statements and tips to accompany the many full-colour and tonal drawing illustrations.Although Ruppel is primarily a digital artist, his working method – which begins with sketches made with felt-tip pens on paper – is applicable to any graphic/painting media. I work in traditional media myself, but Ruppel`s approach – identifying and simplifying the main pictorial elements, finding the geometric shapes that really matter within the composition - are all fundamentals I employ in my own work. As a consequence, this is a most useful book for my teaching, as Ruppel`s excellent, clear examples save me a lot of tedious explanation.This is a very useful little volume; spare, but pertinent in it's written content and hugely informative visually – a highly recommendable purchase.