Book Review: Three Trees Make a Forest

The three artists featured in Three Trees Make a Forest are professional illustrators with a penchant for travel and ambitious side projects in books and Comics. Ronnie Del Carmen is a story artist, character designer and illustrator at Pixar Animation Studios in California. Del Carmen has also worked in comics with DC and Dark Horse. Tadahiro Uesugi is a world renowned illustrator, based in Japan who creates intuitive drawings of landscapes, characters and urban scenery, all with an amazing sense of color and texture. Enrico Casarosa is also a story artist at Pixar and is the founder of Sketch Crawl, a worldwide marathon sketching event. Most of the work found in Three Trees Make a Forest was originally created for an exhibition of the same name at Nucleus Gallery in Alhambra, CA.

This book doesn't have anything to do with trees, although there are painted trees in some of the illustration. It's a very simple art book, an artistic expression of three artists, Ronnie Del Carmen, Tadahiro Uesugi and Enrico Casarosa. It collects the work they have created for an exhibition.

The small hardcover opens up to illustrations from Tadahiro Uesugi. He presents images of urban settings rendered in nice texture, form and lighting. They are basically snapshots of life. Enrico Casarosa, in his section, contributes watercolour portraits of women, with a few dynamic top down camera views. Finally Ronnie Del Carman with his dream girl Nina.

Lacking any stories (and depth), the art just represents themselves, certainly in a style not for everyone. I like Tadahiro Uesugi's work more as there are more detailed and he captures the mood well. Enrico Casarosa's sketches in the book don't really do it for me, his other book The Venice Chronicles is however absolutely wonderful.

Three Trees Make a Forest a beautiful coffee table book, but I would recommended it more to fans of these artists.

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