Dreaming in Mech: The Art of Nivanh Chanthara Paperback – January 1, 2019

I’ve been a fan of Nivanh Chanthara since I found his work on Instagram over a year ago. I love the mix of miltary, mech technology & skulls. I enjoy all of those concepts & it’s really neat to see them meshed together with style. I had a great time flipping through this book & taking a detailed look at his work. It was neat seeing his work in personal & getting to see all the details I missed on Instagram. There was a lot to look through & I know I will be back again for a look see. I recommend to anyone interested in military sci-fi art you will love this!!!Justin

Beautiful art book filled with gorgeous full-color artwork. Nivanh Chanthara's style is super futuristic with a creepy edge and I love it. Almost exclusively (roughly) humanoid robots or cyborgs. Many spreads have both the pencil sketch in B&W along with the fully rendered final model. There are a couple of cool tutorials at the end to give you an idea of Nivanh's process. The quality of printing is impeccable. On par with Design Studio Press stuff. Nice, thick pages. Full color artwork, often full bleed which just looks and feels luxurious.Some artists will try to squeeze in a story to explain things, but there's no time wasted on that here. I don't know that that makes much of a difference, though, because this type of book is eye candy. Buy it to flip through and take inspiration. Drive you to put a little extra time/effort into your own sketches and/or final pieces.

No damage. Incredible content. Shipping was a bit slow but it was definitely worth the wait. A great addition to my reference library and a great source of inspiration for artists. Unfortunately the first two books artstation published [both different artists] are out of stock on Amazon but hopefully they'll have them again sometime. High quality book. Beautiful presentation.

Nivanh Chanthra is a real inspiration. This book shows a little bit of his process and a large number of his beautiful illustrations. The design and layout of the book is marvelous as well. I'm so happy to own this!

PROS----+The book’s construction and page quality is decent.+The design of the book is very clean and impressive at a glance.+Contains lots of well-rendered art of characters.+Captures the creepy sci-fi look very well, and presents a cohesive experience throughout the art book.+The total page length of the book is a good amount for the price.CONS-----A lot of these pieces look like they should be displayed in portrait format instead of sticking with landscape. This makes a chunk of his illustrations feel a little awkward and squashed on the pages.-He renders long slender machines nicely, but I want a little bit more variety in body shapes and mech occupations coming from a concept artist. To each their own, I suppose.-I wish the tutorials he included went through his mental process of creating mechs, rather than just creating line art or coloring.-For someone who has worked in environment art, Chanthara does not showcase many environmental pieces for the viewer in this book. It's a little disappointing.CONCLUSION----This book is great, but not perfect. Within the art book, Nivanh provides two tutorials in the back that serve more as a general overview of his process when tackling concept work or illustrations and should not be an end-all-be-all method for tackling all projects. With that in mind, I’m not entirely sure if these tutorials offer anything “unique” or memorable enough to justify not just including more examples of his illustrations instead. In future books, I would love to see some more of these cool-looking mech designs portrayed in the context of situations they would be in. For example if a sniper were to take point on top of a building, how would it get up there? Grappling hook? Some kind of jumping ability? I wish he portrayed how mechs interact with their environment to fulfill their purpose.Across the board, Chanthara captures the creepy, gritty sci-fi feeling very well as you’d expect from someone that worked on Ghost in the Shell and Deus Ex. But unless you are a die-hard fan of the visual style of either of those series or the creepy-sci-fi-with-skulls aesthetic, I’d maybe think twice about adding this one to your collection since it's admittedly its a very niche genre. I can't say that I regret picking this one up at all, though.

Gorgeous artwork done by a freaking legend! The print quality is great the book is solid with a lot of amazing art. One of my favorite books to draw inspiration from before a sketch sesh.

Bought this book as a Christmas gift for my little brother who wants to be a concept artist. He loved the gift. Only problem was the person who delivered it bent it and stuffed in in our mailbox so the pages we a little bent. But overall a great book from what I saw of it. Might order one for myself.

The book arrived earlier than expected, which is awesome. The print quality is great.This book really does justice to Nivanh's wonderful concepts.