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We have moved to a bigger, better showroom!

Visit us Saturdays, from 12 noon until 5pm
and Monday - Friday, from 11am until 3pm
at our NEW LOCATION:

Stuart Ng Books 20655 S. Western Ave., Suite 104 Torrance, CA 90501

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Dean Yeagle stopped by our Showroom on Saturday January 23rd, 2010, and signed copies of his new Comix Buro sketchbook, as well his Mandy books:

** Peter de Sève - A Sketchy Past – NOW IN STOCK AND AVAILABLE IN OUR SHOWROOM AND BY MAIL! **

Peter de Sève. A SKETCHY PAST: THE ART OF PETER DE SÈVE. [SN26825X] $55

This is the career retrospective book on this fantastic illustrator and designer. It is the book we've all been waiting for: a large format coffee table art book in full color on a heavy mat stock. With a brief text by Amid Amidi. And a Foreword by Chris Wedge (Ice Age).

In this exquisite monograph, world-renowned illustrator and character designer Peter de Sève shows his favorite published and unpublished works. Inventive, eccentric, and often irreverent, they represent a lifetime of drawing . . . a very sketchy past.

Peter de Sève is one of America’s foremost contemporary American illustrators. Beginning his career as an editorial illustrator in the early eighties, de Sève has gone on to create artwork that has graced the covers and interiors of countless major publications, books, and posters. He has also played an influential role in the design of numerous animated feature films, including the blockbuster Ice Age series. The imagery that springs from his pen marries colorful personalities with expert storytelling, and wild flights of imagination with a masterly drawing technique that harkens back to a bygone era of impeccable draftsmanship and craft. Copiously illustrated with hundreds of paintings and drawings, including never-before-published New Yorker cover roughs, behind-the-scenes animation development artwork, and personal sketches, A Sketchy Past is the first comprehensive survey of de Sève’s work. A career-spanning biographical essay written by historian Amid Amidi, along with comments from de Sève throughout the book, offer a unique insight into his approach to illustration and his artistic process.

"Peter’s characters are believable, original, and always appealing. Even his “bad guys” are appealing. Be it a grasshopper, a pelican, or an angler fish, Peter takes something you think you know and gives it to you in a way that you’ve never seen it before."—John Lasseter, chief creative officer, Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios

"It may sound overly simplistic, but Peter can just draw! His style is based on an ability to draw without any tricks or fancy techniques. It’s the type of thing that drives comic book and animation artists crazy."—Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy

A Sketchy Past was recently featured in The New York Times Sunday Book Review:

"Peter de Sève is much better known than kamishibai artists, but he does the same job of telling stories. His numerous covers for The New Yorker tell ironic tales of the city. “Panhandler,” a fanciful drawing of the mythical half man, half goat Pan playing his proverbial pipes on a New York street corner, is as farcical as it is evocative of the real talents who busk for loose change. De Sève’s “Through the Wringer,” showing a flabby naked man walking through an airport metal detector (ignored by all the passers-by), captures the way many people actually feel when going through the ordeal. These and many more illustrations are collected in a gorgeously designed coffee-table book, A SKETCHY PAST: The Art of Peter de Sève (Akileos, $54.95).

"The sketches implied in the title are probably the best part. De Sève’s finished pieces are very fluid and impressionistic while totally representational, with hints of caricature at every turn. But his looser sketches are the real masterpieces of visual erudition. He depicts character and expression so completely with only a few well-composed lines and shades. And among the most delightful, in a book that will doubtless serve as a textbook for today’s aspiring artists, are production sketches for the animated “Ice Age” films, for which he designed the amazing characters (under the supervision of the director Chris Wedge, who wrote the book’s foreword). Although de Sève is certainly a people person, drawingwise, I haven’t seen such a master with animals since John James Audubon — if Audubon had done caricatures of prehistoric creatures, that is." - Steven Heller

Each copy of A Sketchy Past comes with a signed bookplate, designed exclusively for Stuart Ng Books:

Paris: Akileos, 2009. 1st edition. 12 ½" x 11" x 1", 240 pages, color and black & white illustrations, hardcover pictorial boards. VF book/VF dust-jacket. Weight almost 5 lbs.

Stuart Ng Books exhibited at the CTN Animation Expo in November:

Peter de Sève

Eric Goldberg

Andreas Deja

William Stout in the Stuart Ng Books showroom on April 18th, in Torrance, California.

Each customer could request a picture of his or her favorite dinosaur for Mr. Stout to draw.

Just one example of William Stout's fantastic art, as drawn for one of our customers.

Eric Goldberg. CHARACTER ANIMATION CRASH COURSE! [SN24199X] $35

Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2008. 1st. Small 4to (9-11"), 240pp, 240 color illustrations, wraps. VF. Signed by the artist with a picture of the genie.