Republishing some books

After almost 20 years in print, The Illustrators Bible has finally gone out of print. If we are to judge by the astronomical prices for Gouache For Illustration on the used book market,(which went out of print several years ago) Bible will surely follow.

Having seen ridiculous prices for Gouache, with single copies over $400. I realized that everyone was making money except for me, the author. Fortunately we now have the technology to put it back in my hands. I will be working with a branch of Amazon to produce high-quality reprints. Because they are custom printings, they will be more expensive than the originals (which were $29.95 and $24.95 respectively). We have not arrived at the final price point but you can figure on about twice the cover price.

In the years since writing those books, I have learned new things, technology and resources have changed and the old books don't reflect those changes, so I am updating and upgrading both of them. These will be expanded with new text and illustrations.

Additional to the custom printed editions, we are working on a more economical downloadable version that might (perhaps) include a few videos where needed to amplify the information.

As many of you know, gouache is my favorite medium. In the book, I purposely did what I do when teaching…avoid showing off. I left that for John Ball and Dan Tennant to do…and they really shone as the masters of the medium they had become. It is only natural that in the intervening years my skill sets should have improved. So in this revised edition of Gouache, I have decided to show what the medium can do when I pull out all the stops. There will be examples of work done in my professional practice and some done for no other reason than to enjoy what a brush and paint can do.

As is typical of my recent work, most of my pictures are done small and shown enlarged. This is one of my dragons and he’s loaded with texture. It’s really quite a simple approach with never more than three tones on any rendered area (most of the scaly texture is just two tones…highlight and shadow). The message I can impart is that the simpler the rendering, the more illusionistic it becomes.

The accompanying dragon study is one of the new illustrations that will be added to the revised book and the digital book.