The Creature Garden by Zanna Goldhawk, Harry Goldhawk

The Creature Garden by Zanna Goldhawk, Harry Goldhawk ISBN-13: 9781631064272 Hardcover: 160 pages Publisher: Rock Point Released: May 29, 2018

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
The Creature Garden is filled with drawing and design ideas for over fifty animals, trees, plants, and even creatures of myth and lore. Each chapter features a beautifully illustrated opener, step by step instructions for all the animals featured, and interesting facts and folklore on the creatures being featured. This gorgeous art book contains both beautiful stylized art technique and interesting information about natural history, regional folklore, and animals both real and imagined.


My Review:
The Creature Garden is a step-by-step guide to drawing or painting stylized animals and plants. For each animal, the authors illustrated how to draw the basic shapes--circles, triangles, rectangles--and connect the shapes to give the basic animal outline. Then they showed which direction to paint and provided illustrations for adding color and patterns with additional details added in each step. The text mainly described information about the animal with a few tips on how to make a stylized animal recognizable.

They briefly talked about various materials you might use, like markers, watercolors, gouache, and acrylic. They showed how to make the patterns on animal coats. Overall, the illustrations do a good job of showing how to make these animals and plants, especially if you are comfortable with how-to art books with minimal text.

The authors showed how to draw a jaguar, snow leopard, tiger, lion, house cat, dog, wolf, fox, horse, deer, hare, panda, bears, sloth, elephant, giraffe, whale, dolphin, tropical fish, narwhal, octopus, seahorse, swan, flamingo, peacock, crane, owl, cardinal, butterfly, moth, damselfly, bee, phoenix, fairy, mermaid, unicorn, pegasus, griffin, centaur, hippogriff, and Asian dragon. They also provided step-by-step illustrations for several garden plants, forest plants, jungle plants, and underwater plants.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.