Fantastic Cities: A Colouring Book of Amazing Places Real and Imagined by Steve McDonald
This unique colouring book features immersive aerial views of real cities from around the world alongside gorgeously illustrated, Inception-like architectural mandalas. Artist Steve McDonald's beautifully rendered and detailed line work offers bird's-eye perspectives of visually arresting global locales from New York, London, and Paris to Istanbul, Tokyo, and Guadalajara, Rio, Amsterdam, and many more. The book's distinctive large square format offers absorbingly complex vistas to colour--nearly 60--including a selection of mind-bending labyrinthine architectural illustrations for still deeper meditative colouring adventures and imaginative flights of fancy.
Steve McDonald doesn't just draw the cities of the world. A lifelong traveler since his family moved to the Middle East in 1979, he actually visits them, soaking up the local colour, the architecture, and, most of all - the lines. Although he did spend the better part of two decades traveling from coast to coast of his native Canada, capturing the colours of its majestic outdoors in oil, water colour, and acrylic paintings, it really has always been about the lines. You can see his love of line leaping off the page of his bird's-eye view drawings of cities, villages, and rural scenes from around the world. Whereas most of us might look down at a city and see only urban sprawl, Steve sees those lines - ALL of them - and then harnesses their rigid beauty toward his own ends - the creation of impossibly detailed, mind-bendingly complicated tableaux. The results, mind you, are anything but rigid. Look closely, and you'll see that the drawings all have a pulse - an architectural heart beats in every single one.
Paperback: 60 pages
29.2cm x 29.8cm.
ISBN: 978architecture1452149578.