Lora Hates Spam

by Michael Dobrzycki, , Bob Berry, Cynthia Knox, Meredith Dillman

A look at the beautifully shaded drawings on the cover is enough to tell me this is above my drawing level, but I thought I would give it a try anyway and see if my perspective might improve.

Like many drawing books, it goes over tools and materials first. I noted the inclusion of tortillions, used for smudge shading. This is followed by a section on shading techniques, so a lot of possibility there for improving my skills. Then we get to the construction of creatures using basic shapes. They make it look so easy!

The creating textures section goes into more detail than I've seen in a lot of books. I can see this becoming the key, along with the shading, to making the drawings have that detailed finished look. The details on claws, horns and especially wing positions was extremely well done.

The creatures shown in the instructions include the western dragon, eastern dragon, wyvern (perhaps a good starting project as it has fewer fiddly bits), wyrm, water dragon, hydra, sui riu (Japanese rain dragon), centaur, fairy, minotaur, satyr, griffin and unicorn. The fact that it's weighted towards dragon-related creatures is part of the appeal of the book to me.

There is another section on tools and materials, this time for adding colour. This goes into using marker for an alternative dragon design, a pegasus in pencil and marker and another fairy in coloured pencil. Then a detailed drawing of a wisteria fairy is provided for working in water colour, though there are no instructions for drawing this one.

Overall I think the book is wonderful, but it's going to take some real practice to get to a level that looks as good as the pictures provided.