RatCreature

This was really tedious with all the repetitions both within and from previous books. I don't mind detail of world building and everyday life; I like that in this series overall, but nobody needs to be told events that happened previously again and again. An editor should have cut a lot of this.

Leider ist der letzte Teil der Trilogie ins Merkwürdige abgedriftet, mit paranormalen Wahrnehmungen, Visionen von Verstorbenen, mystischen Verbindungen zwischen Zwillingen und dergl. die für mich überhaupt nicht ins Genre passen.

Quite a mixed bag of stories. I liked the first two, the third was okay, but couldn't get more than a few pages into the last story.

I liked this quite a bit, until the end motivation for the killer was made for him to have lost his wife to cannibalism by a New Guinea tribe. Unfortunately the people whose name was given, the Korowai, didn't even have contact with Europeans until the 1970s when this book takes place in 1910. Not to mention that I doubt the characterization of the ritual cannibalism as the racist cliche of randomly murdering and eating white European women has any basis in facts (and those were implied to be factual events, not racist, colonial projections of the time's characters).

I have to admit upfront that I'm not into fashion design, but mostly wanted some help to understand different and "advanced" clothing in figure drawing for better character design.

The main shortcoming is that it only covers female figure, features, poses, nothing for sketching men and presenting clothing on them. Also while it has some nice inspiration for different facial shapes, features, and hair styles, it is not diverse at all, i.e. all the sketched women appear to be white.

The part with the common body twists to show off clothing was useful, but some of the exaggerations were way over the top. Which maybe some like in design sketches, but I found many grotesque looking. Their starting point for unexaggerated proportions is the already somewhat idealized 8-head proportion (the average actual human is more likely 7 heads high, though of course that is not as easily divided in sections, and with 6-8 heads still normal looking, 8 is convenient). And while the 8.5 head they give as fashion proportion are common enough for that, the book takes that as normal and goes further when exaggerating, in some instances going with a 10-10.5 head hight and truly bizarre leg lengths. Even superhero exaggerations only go to nine heads high and then with a width increase. So that made plenty of the figures painful to look at.

I liked the section with basic female clothing shapes and elements better, so it's helpful for that.

It's a very cool book with a great systematic approach as a reference for expressions. My only quibble with it is that the green overlaid color is on some pages slightly out of alignment in my copy. It's only a few millimeters but that kind of printing fault shouldn't happen in an art book. It's nowhere bad enough to impede usefulness or legibility, though.