The Art of Fullmetal Alchemist

I got this for my boyfriend and I looked at it before I gave it to him. It's really cool. Hiromu Arakawa has captions for each picture letting you know what different pictures were for, what the pictures are supposed to represent and even how she messed up in different paintings. It's really intersting and worth it for a Fullmetal Alchemist fan.

i "Watched" this book and Well i gotta say that it was really great. Hiromu Arakawa adds little comments for every picture and it has great artwork. The backgrounds are a little disappointing, but she does really well on the characters in color. And she PAINTS them! THe colors are extrememly bright and vivid. Hiromu Arakawa is getting better at the characters every year. She's advanced a lot. It's for the manga, not the anime, so if you prefer anime over the manga you may want to get an anime artbook...

It may be confusing as to what exactly the Fullmetal Alchemist artbook contains. It's not the artbook for the anime, but the manga. Therefore, the book is mostly a compilation of the manga artist's traditional works. Hiromu Arakawa has mastered a medium that is rarely used by anime artists; acrylic paint. This makes her pieces stand out against what is typically seen in the anime world, but at the same time they are as polished, beautiful, and dynamic as any other anime artbook images I've seen. What the other reviewer said is true, it's mostly character art-but that's the focus of most artbooks of manga illustrators. If you want the components of the anime, backgrounds, a detail of Ed's watch, etc, you should look to fanbooks. If you've never read the manga before, you should know that Arakawa's characters in print look a little different than thier animated counterparts, so you might enjoy the original take on them here. (They're still easily recognizable and Arakawa makes thier personality come out in her paintings.) There are also a small number of images from the FMA game.