Hildebrandt / Tolkien Years
Greg & Tim Hildebrandt - The Tolkien Years
The Tolkien Years Of The Brothers Hildebrandt
(2001 /2012) 
Greg & Tim Hildebrandt - The Tolkien Years (2001-Watson-Guptill Publications) A year after the first edition of this book, the publishers put out the 'expanded' edition with a dozen more pages of additional drawings & paintings. That's the one with the wedding on the cover and the one I'm scoring here. No reason not to get it, as it indeed scores a bit better than its predecessor. I'm not totally loving it, as many pages have a cluttered, crowded feel about them. First, there are six full-fledged double-page-spreads, all but one remaining passable in that form. There's another 14 of them that do spread a large image somewhat over the central gutter and I guess that none of them just flunk out like that (though it wouldn't be my choice). 25 more pages give almost the whole page to featuring some large reproduction in admirable style. But then another 33 pages exhibit a large reproduction while throwing in constituent preliminaries, figure studies & sketches, as well as photographs of the posers. Another 40 pages throw all that stuff in, without any dominating art-piece, not to mention that six of those are pages with *only* photos and indistinct sketchwork. The rest of this 144-page edition is given over mainly to text by Greg Hildebrandt's son, with plenty of quotes & anecdotes from the artists themselves, again with a number of smaller visual aids tossed in for good measure. Did I already say the book feels cluttered ? I presume that all the works from the three years that the Brothers Hildebrandt created Tolkien calendars are present here, but know that since the 1970s the duo has had a number of commissions and other opportunities to visit Middle Earth again & again, to express their personal vision of the goings-on there. Express captions are rare, but it's pretty clear what everything is, if not the usual other details. Think 10.5-inch square for the volume's dimensions. The related books STAR WARS and THE FANTASY ART TECHNIQUES OF TIM HILDEBRANDT score better than this one, but only four paintings from the latter repeat here from them. (Note that the French version of the first edition here is entitled LE SEIGNEUR DES ANNEAUX-L'ART DE TOLKIEN).
The Tolkien Years Of The Brothers Hildebrandt (2012-Dynamite) The 2012 coming of another Tolkien film trilogy, this time The Hobbit, must have spurred the Dynamite imprint to revive & re-title the previous book and re-work some of the pages, with nary a word that you would be getting pretty much the same book with yet another eight pages of new material. I still need to canvas it to see what changed.
Related Books
Ballantine's Brothers Hildebrandt books
The Fantasy Art Techniques Of Tim Hildebrandt
From Tolkien To Oz - The Art Of Greg Hildebrandt
The Brothers Hildebrandt - A Book About The Artists [BELOW THE LINE]
other Watson-Guptil releases
Norman Rockwell - Illustrator [BELOW THE LINE]
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