[57R]⋙ Download Gratis Above the Timberline Gregory Manchess 9781481459235 Books

Above the Timberline Gregory Manchess 9781481459235 Books

Download As PDF : Above the Timberline Gregory Manchess 9781481459235 Books

Above the Timberline Gregory Manchess 9781481459235 Books

You can tell from the illustrations that you can see here that this is an absolutely beautiful book. Did anyone describe the plot? It's about a boy searching for his lost father across an Arctic wasteland 1500 years into our future when our planet is covered with ice and our cities long dead and buried deep. (Enjoyed the shout-out to Cincinnati's Union Terminal, model for the original Hall of Justice!) This is an old-time pulp adventure with new sensibilities.

Since I'm probably about the only person who bought this for a Kindle (I can't hold the paper version), I thought I would let people know what to expect. I read this on a 10 inch Samsung Tab S. Each of the paintings is shown as a full illustration in a wide screen movie kind of format with any text part of the image. The images were clear and sharp and gorgeous-- seeing the pictures on a screen did nothing to detract from them.

There is text on almost all of the pages, sometimes several paragraphs of it. At its original magnification it can't be read; it's small but that's not the reason. The text is a font that fuzzes out a bit at normal magnification, so expect to zoom in on every page. And even blown up quite a bit the font is still a little shaky and thin. But a nice thing about Kindles is it you can blow that page up until you can read it. Once I zoomed in to the text it took a good 10 seconds for the page to "enhance" the image but then the text was clear and readable. Sometimes that was a little frustrating, but it always made me slow down and appreciate the illustrations while I was waiting.

So it's not quite the experience you'd have reading a print version, but it's darned close. For me it's all about the illustrations, and the ebook delivers them in full.


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Above the Timberline Gregory Manchess 9781481459235 Books Reviews

Above the Timberline is a graphic novel by the artist Greg Manchess.
This book started out with the cover. Manchess painted it because he just wanted to paint polar bears and snow. He showed it to his publisher and the idea to make a book of it came to fruition. Manchess painted over a hundred oil paintings in seven years. I have been following his endeavors online. There is a video of the process of making the cover image. I will leave a link in the description. This book is truly a labor of love.

Above the Timberline is an homage to old pulp novels from the fifties. It tells the story of Wes Singleton, a fearless young adventurer that is searching for his lost father. The story takes place in the year 3518 in a world of ice. The story is told in a journal. They are snippets of text and are not more than an addition to the beautiful imagery. In this version, you really need to zoom in on the text to make it readable. But as great a storyteller Manchess is in his images, a writer he is not. That is unfortunate because the images are breathtaking. I stopped reading the text because it did not flow well in the journal style it is written in. As I read in an interview about Above the Timberline, Manchess told he started this project by painting the cover image, because he wanted to paint snow and polar bears. He made up the story afterward. I think that also happened with the writing of this story. The images came first and the text was an afterthought.

So let’s concentrate on the art. All the painting are oils on canvas. Manchess paints in a very loose style and yet it looks very realistic. When you zoom in on the images, you can see the texture of the canvas and the lucid strokes he made to make the images come alive. The art reminds me a bit of Indiana Jones. Cool vehicles, like a zeppelin, a Red Baron-like plane. Aviator outfits and animals of a future ice age. It has a lot of elements of Jules Verne. A Steampunk related future.
Greg Manchess also makes a cameo in this scene. You can see him with a glass of Whiskey.
The composition of all the scenes is impeccable. And the lighting and color schemes Manchess uses are astounding. His brushwork is very loose but very effective.

To be honest, I don’t care much for the story. I bought this book for the art of Greg Manchess. He is one of the best illustrators at the moment and you can only be in awe of the beautiful art in this book. You can learn a ton by looking at the images and learn from the compositions, layouts, brush strokes an lighting.
“Above the Timberline” is similar in theme and style to James Gurney’s Dinotopia illustrated books. The story takes place in the future, on an earth that has experienced an environmental cataclysm causing the poles to shift and enter a new ice age. The protagonist is a teen in search of his explorer father, who in turn was searching for a mystical city deep in the depths of a frozen wasteland. There is a touch of ‘steampunk’ as this future society uses zeppelins and steam locomotives for transportation. The story is engaging; I highly recommend it for young teens and all readers who enjoy illustrated books.

Manchess illustrates in a style similar to Gurney’s though there is a notable difference. The Dinotopia series takes place on a hidden tropical island which allowed the artist to use a broader more saturated pallet of colors, whereas taking place in a frozen environment, Manchess’s pallet consists primarily of blues that have more limited tonal values.

I have just two criticisms. First, the print is way too small; a fault of the publisher and not the artist/author. I compared the fonts and Dinotopia appears to be a font 12 or 13, whereas the print size in “Above the Timberline” appears to be about a font 9 or 10. Also, Dinotopia is printed in black against a white background, whereas Timberline is printed in both black ink as well as white against a dark background. As I am an older reader, the small font size and shift in contrast made it difficult to read.

Second, I had the good fortune of visiting the Society of Illustrators in New York, in October 2017, where I saw many of the original paintings. The book illustrations are good, but Manchess’s original works are superb. I compared a photo I took of an original painting for the book, to the illustration in the book and the original colors were more vibrant, the shadows not as dark, the colors more luminous. The texture of the canvas is slightly visible in the originals giving the paintings more depth. This doesn’t deter from the book, but it also doesn’t give Manchess full credit as an exceptionally talented illustrator.
You can tell from the illustrations that you can see here that this is an absolutely beautiful book. Did anyone describe the plot? It's about a boy searching for his lost father across an Arctic wasteland 1500 years into our future when our planet is covered with ice and our cities long dead and buried deep. (Enjoyed the shout-out to Cincinnati's Union Terminal, model for the original Hall of Justice!) This is an old-time pulp adventure with new sensibilities.

Since I'm probably about the only person who bought this for a (I can't hold the paper version), I thought I would let people know what to expect. I read this on a 10 inch Samsung Tab S. Each of the paintings is shown as a full illustration in a wide screen movie kind of format with any text part of the image. The images were clear and sharp and gorgeous-- seeing the pictures on a screen did nothing to detract from them.

There is text on almost all of the pages, sometimes several paragraphs of it. At its original magnification it can't be read; it's small but that's not the reason. The text is a font that fuzzes out a bit at normal magnification, so expect to zoom in on every page. And even blown up quite a bit the font is still a little shaky and thin. But a nice thing about s is it you can blow that page up until you can read it. Once I zoomed in to the text it took a good 10 seconds for the page to "enhance" the image but then the text was clear and readable. Sometimes that was a little frustrating, but it always made me slow down and appreciate the illustrations while I was waiting.

So it's not quite the experience you'd have reading a print version, but it's darned close. For me it's all about the illustrations, and the ebook delivers them in full.