Imagine FX; Manga: The Ultimate Guide to Mastering Digital Painting Techniques
is a collection of digital painting tutorials by professional artists featured in the "Imagine FX Magazine".
Released in 2011 and comes at prices from 15 to 25$.

After the introduction of the book comes the section "Gallery" in which the featured artist where shown with profiles and some of their works.
Every artist give some comments about their shown works and tell how they came to digital painting and what their style is about.

The next section is "Manga for beginners" it contains some short advices of what is important to a Manga drawing, what is not really necessary because this book is definitely nothing for beginners.
Also Saejin Oh from Canada a former deviant artist (some may remember "saejinoh") explains what Manga is about like the big eyes, fancy hair n stuff and how it builds an emotional connection on the first look by its really accessible style.

Even though there are already some tutorials in the "Manga for beginners" section, i would make a cut here.
The next section i would name "Tutorials" which is splitted into different parts like "Character creation", "Manga style" n stuff.
So in the tutorials section the artist take a specific art of theirs and show how it was made from scratch.
They made really in depth "step by step" explanations with a picture for each step.
Every issue has an unique style and is very inspiring.
There are standards like chromatics, light and shading but also some exotic stuff.

Between each tutorial there are inserts that are called "Artist Q&A"  where the artist answer some questions of the Imagine FX readers with text and example pictures.

At the end there is a short section about sequential art but it is also more like basics...

Now to my conclusion:

The good things:
-The artists featured in this book are really professionals and their art is amazing.
I have too often bought a book about drawing and the artist was idk... bad?
-The tutorials are extremely in depth some are close to 20 steps and everyone with a picture.
-The tutorials are very various in points of style and issue.
-Even the art itself is teaching and highly inspiring.
-Also the book itself is art.
It is a good feeling to hold it in the hand, all the pages are full of color (no clean white backgrounds)
And the composition of pictures and text make it a good read.

The not so good things:
-As i said before this is a collection of tutorials that were already featured in the "Imagine FX Magazine" which means if you have some of the older issues of this magazine, you will have those tutorials.
I don't know if there is Imagine FX in Germany but i bought this book anyway.
-Some works are made with Corel Painter but most of them are made with PS.
I know that most people use it, but if you don't use it (like me) some of the things that are shown would be made in a different way in SAI for example or sometimes even impossibru.
-As i also said before this book is absolutely nothing for beginners!
The used techniques are very advanced.
-As the title says, this book is all about digital painting, there may be one tutorial about marker pens but at least there is nothing about traditional ways of painting.
-Also it is all about Illustration in exception of the short tutorials in the end.
If you are interested in the sequential art of Manga you will not find it here


In the end i have to say that "Manga" is not the best choice for the Name of this book because for me, Manga is about the Japanese way of comic drawing and not illustrating.
And even if you just watch to the aspect of illustrating, some of the arts are not literally Manga illustrations because the style is in particular very western and an really realistic Manga style.
But in my opinion, the illustrative skills are also important to an comic artist and i love the beautiful art that is shown in this book.
Also it is very helpful and inspiring so i don't regret this buy.

Quality: 10
Creativity: 10
Entertainment  Edjucation:10