Book Review – Fundamentals of Character Design

Fundamentals of Character Design: How to Create Engaging Characters for Illustration, Animation & Visual Development by Publishing 3dtotal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a well-assembled and reasonably comprehensive guide to the title topic. Particularly for aspiring sequential artists who are new to character design, the principles and practices outlined here will help get you off to a good start. The text was created by professional designers, many of whom write like designers (which is to say that the prose is often less than engaging). But the visual examples more than make up for weak spots in the text. If I could change one thing, I’d bring in a wider variety of graphic styles. Though examples clearly come from different illustrators, none of them depart too radically from Disney/Pixar styles. I should also note that borrowing this from Hoopla was a mistake. It’s set up as an eb00k rather than a comic, which makes the tiny type difficult to enlarge enough to make it readable. And the book features several galleries of suggestions for facial expression, body posture, clothing and the like. I wish I could hang onto those valuable references for longer than 20 days.

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