Character Mentor: Learn by Example to Use Expressions, Poses, and Staging to Bring Your Characters to Life
"You've researched your character extensively, tailored her to your audience, sketched hundreds of versions, and now you lean back content as you gaze at your final character model sheet. But now what? Whether you want to use her in an animated film, television show, video game, web comic, or children's book, you're going to have to make her perform. How a character looks and is costumed starts to tell her story, but her body language reveals even more. Character Mentor shows you how to pose your character, create emotion through facial expressions, and stage your character to create drama. Author Tom Bancroft addresses each topic with clear, concise prose, and then shows you what he really means through commenting on and redrawing artwork from a variety of student 'apprentices.' His assignments allow you to join in and bring your drawing to the next level with concrete techniques, as well as more theoretical analysis. Character Mentor is an apprenticeship in a book."--CartoonBrew.com"If, like me, you are always looking to push yourself as a character artist I cannot recommend this book enough... Each chapter is a lesson on a specific topic, ranging from Posing to Shape-based composition. At the end of a chapter [Tom] sets you homework followed by examples of completed tasks by fellow students. Tom himself has gone over each example, annotating and thoroughly explaining each one in order for you to see how to bring your own work up to scratch...The best thing about this book for me, however, is that it doesn’t end. You can never be truly finished with it as the teachings within are always relevant...it’s like having a teacher on your shelf that will never be too busy to help you out and will always give you good advice."--Robin Liebschner, Skwigly.com