The Art of Animal Character Design, Second Edition

The media could not be loaded.  David Colman is a character designer specializing in animals. The Art of Animal Character Design is a sketchbook containing his wonderful caricatured animal designs.This is not the step-by-step instructional art book. However, it does contain a lot of practical tips and points to look out when drawing animals. He workflow is to observe, to think and then to draw. The emphasis is on thinking and he talks about his thought process for the sketches in the book.His principle is to draw what the animal is doing and draw the character of the animal, rather than just drawing the animal. To quote from the book, it's to draw the 'verb', not the 'noun'. This is the repeating theme throughout the book, and it shows in his examples.There are a lot of interesting and useful insights provided. For example, he talks about the need to lock down shapes to preserve design integrity so that the animal is still recognizable. There are also tips on how to improve believability through the application of gravity and forces. Other than just drawing animals, he would also caricature humans into their animal form based on their behaviour. There's also a section on creating imaginary animals.This book is a very good resource to character designers. It's highly recommended.(More pictures are available on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)

This book is a wonderful asset to any illustrator, character designer, animator, etc. The collection of images is very entertaining to look at and enjoy, and also to study learn from. As an illustration student I found the written content of the book to be just as helpful as the pictoral, and have already seen improvement in my work from following the advice he gives. The book includes a good variety of mediums as well as sketches, process, and more finished work.The book itself, as a book, did not seem to be extremely well designed. I don't think there's anything blatantly wrong about it, but you can tell that the design of the pages was not what was important when creating this book. It's a very very minor detail that is barely noticeable next to the lovely artwork in the book.This was worth every penny I spent on it.

Make no mistake, this is NOT a book that teaches you how to draw. This is for more advanced illustrators. It's simply a guide filled with wonderful examples and text that expresses how you can characterize animals (the same can be applied to people). All these tips and lessons and examples help you see what the artist is trying to tell you. Its a great book to learn from if you're seriously thinking about learning how to cartoon properly.

"The Art of Animal Character Design" (second edition) by David Colman was beautifully printed and the cover was sturdy and the colours within the book was rich and lovely. The advice within the book was solid; but I really wished that there were more new sketches from Colman, cause most of the sketches in the book can be found on his Deviantart... You can see a flip-through of this book via this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNk4XsoQ9VI

great book

Inspirational Book in Drawing Animals and giving them Life.

Wonderful book for artists on how to design animals. So many useful lessons and illustrations presented through out.

If you're interested in animal character design you will love this book. It won't teach you how to draw, but the sketches will give you inspiration for yourself, what kind of characters to draw. It also has some good advice on how to improve your drawing, especially for professionals. This book is interesting if you know how to draw, but want to get to the next level with character design.