Steambot Studios sent me a surprise gift and it's the artbook Genesis of Urbance, probably because of the post I wrote about their Kickstarter campaign last year.

Urbance is an animated series created by Joel Dos Reis Veigas and Sébastien Larroudé and produced by Steambot.

This project comes after Exodyssey when they wanted to create a new original property.

When I first saw the trailer, I was really attracted to the style. It reminded me of Robert Valley's art which was really stylized and stylish. Yes, he was mentioned as an inspiration together with Takeshi Koike.

This artbook collects the concept art that goes into the design of the animation. There are lots of character designs, beautiful environment art on Neo-City, keyframes and a gallery of splash art. The keyframes are line art for the frames used for the animation before colours are added.

Highlight of the book for me are the character designs. I love the stylized look, poses and anime colouring style. The characters look and feel very lively and solid, grounded.

Commentary is provide on every spread talking about the design and inspiration.

It's a great artbook. 168 pages. Paperback. Limited to 1,000 copies.

You can get the book at https://steambot.ca/category/shop