Traditional Japanese Designs

Rating:
Summary: A relatively good book - depends on what you're looking for
Review: I guess why I didn't like this book much is probably more a question of tastes and of personal needs that it did not fit, rather than a problem of quality of the book itself.

There are about 80 different designs throughout the 32 pages. Most of them are pretty big, and all are extremly clearly outlined, making them very easy to copy. Beware though if you're used to make carbon copies, which leave marks on the other side of the page, as pages are printed on both sides.

But as an amateur web designer, I was looking for borders and rather "abstract" designs or small "sceneries" that I could adapt to use to decorate my website, as you find in the Dover series. But you don't find such things in that book. It's organized by categories, mostly animals (birds, fishes, butterflies) and plants (trees, bamboos, blossoms), with some traditional objects (fans, masks, buddhistic symbols) at the end. But there is no combination of several elements to create a more complex one. What I mean is that I'd wished that more designs would be like the one on the cover; but instead of having other combinations like that one for instance (two fans within a circle), all the other fans are individually represented.

Moreover, I find most of them pretty boring and plain (with a few exception in the blossom/flowers and butterflies sections), lacking the sum of details that you find in other books, a result of over-simplification.

I can see that this book could maybe be useful for someone who needs such simplified designs, for batik for instance, and this is why I gave it 3 stars. But for people who draw, either with "traditional" tools or digitally, and who are looking for highly detailed, somewhat intricate ones, they'll want to look elsewhere