Book Review: The Art of Iron Man

This book contains concept art, photographs, paintings, storyboards, miniatures and live models. The main artists involved were Ryan Meinerding and Phil Sanders.

For people who like mechanical stuff, you'll be glad that to know that plenty of iron man designs are included. The drawings are detailed to the nuts and bolts. The evolution of Iron Man from concept to movie can be clearly seen from the first concept art right down to the life size cast created.

3D modelers who are looking for blueprints won't find them in this book. However, there are renders of Iron Man Mark II and Iron Monger from the front and side view. They should be enough to build the blueprint from.

Also included are the drawings for the environment, props and gadgets. That includes Tony Stark's house, his workshop and the Arc Reactor.

The last part of the book contains storyboards and pre-vis plates. Pre-vis are 3D storyboards screenshots. They discuss the story development and the challenges to shooting the movie.

All the pictures in the book are well captioned. They explain clearly the production process and the effect they are trying to achieve.

The only bad thing about the book is the paper stock. It is not thick enough. While black pages are cool, the paper has to be thick enough to absorb all the ink. If not, the paper becomes wavy. Luckily, it doesn't affect the visual quality of the images printed.

I still gave it a 5-star rating on Amazon — more to 4.5-star because of the paper stock.

There are more pictures of the art book on my blog, including a flipping-page video.