Karl Kopinski has a style to his work that tickles my fancy – some of it throws me back to my love of Heavy Metal magazine (especially early to mid 90s era), but it is a lot more than that. His range of work is amazing, and his sketchwork has amazed me for years.

So I was excited when this book showed up in my mailbox. Primarily a collection of his sketches on nice heavy matte stock, the 296 page book finishes off with about 50 pages of colour plates.

As usual, you’ll have to excuse my messy desk and lousy photography skills – I need to set up something better for taking pictures of stuff like this, but was too excited this morning to actually do something like that before pulling out my potato-camera and snapping a few shots through the interior of the book.

The collection of work is mostly sketchbook pages as mentioned, in B&W. There’s a lot of motion and just about everything is immediate fodder for RPG ideas – from this barbarian dragging a monstrous head with him to these guys planning something that’s certainly not all above-table.

But I have a huge weakness for sci-fi art, and Karl delivers with hoverbikers / swoopgangers,

and cyberenhanced warriors and servitors heading to the battlefield.

And an awesome assortment of action-ready sci-fi adventurers.

And then the back of the book brings us to the colour plates – which starts off with what feels like the entire cast of my last Call of Cthulhu campaign. And suddenly I want to play Call of Cthulhu again. Or maybe Gangbusters!

And transitions into more “modern” and cyberpunk heroes perfect for my character sheets.

And some awesome sci-fi pieces that are still full of character.

The book is a weighty tome just under 300 pages from Editions Caurette. It is sturdy and sexy and makes me want to write up characters and scenes for a dozen different RPGs right now.

You can order it direct from Editions Caurette (and check out a bunch more art from the book) from their website.