Worlds of Amano - Yoshitaka Amano's Artwork

I’ve just bought a beautiful book called Worlds of Amano. I’ve been a fan of Yoshitaka Amano’s art for a decade without knowing it - his art graces the covers of several of Michael Moorcock’s Elric books. He is also well-known for creating artwork for Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel series, Sandman. 

 
The art book itself.

It features his artwork over the decade for multiple projects ranging from traditional Japanese stories to concept art for the Final Fantasy game to artwork for the book Vampire Hunter D. (Yes, apparently it was a book before it became an anime film). 

 
Amano’s rendition of Moorcock’s character Elric.

The images are extremely large, often spreading wider than an A4. It does not include tutorials on what techniques he has used to create the pieces, but because the images are so large and because it lists both the size of the piece and the materials used, you can figure some of it out yourself. 

 
Cover for one of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman books

Most of the artwork is acrylics with colored ink, sometimes with gold leafing is well. You can also admire his lithograph printmaking as well as a few powerful but still beautifully elegant indian ink drawings. 

For being a hardcover artbook with such good-quality large prints of images, it was decently priced. (I bought it for 30€, but depending on what country you are in, you can probably find it for even cheaper.) So if you like his style of art as much as I do, I highly recommend buying the book - you won’t find as high-resolution images of his stunning and oftentimes huge artwork anywhere else. (They are often at least 7 m high ‘in the flesh’, and a large book page does it more justice than a puny 500 pixels wide internet image.) 

Links: 

Dark Horse Comics has a good short blurb about the book and also includes a preview of some of the artwork, a review, some desktops, and more. 

Amano’s World - Amano’s very own website. Unfortunately, it’s frustratingly slow-loading for me, but you can even buy pieces of his real artwork here as well as posters and more. [Note: Site has since gone down since the original posting of this entry]

Wikipedia on Amano.