Character Design Made Easy

• Produced in association with the Character Design Forge, the book combines all elements of character development from initial design, storyboards and scripts to deliver a comprehensive and creative manual of strong, exceptional characters. A complete artistic course that guides the reader to understanding all elements of memorable, strong characters for gaming, commercials, graphic novels or cartoon strips.

  All you need to learn the art of creating iconic, fun and memorable characters!Character design is the art and process of defining a new character and their physical, mental, psychological and social attributes.

• Ideal for all those involved in creating artwork for gaming, animation, advertising, social memes, cartoons, graphic novels and comic strips.
• Course structure provides tutorials on all the basics plus sections on story telling, rendering and developing expressions.
• Includes both pen and pencil techniques as well as Procreate screen grabs for both digital and analogue artists.

• Each chapter includes an introduction and brief refresher from the previous section to monitor and measure your progress as the course develops. Take your artistic skills to the next level and develop characters that are memorable and bursting with personality.

  Autorentext

  Brookes Eggleston, founder of Character Design Forge in New York has worked in studio settings and in a freelance capacity as a Character Designer, Illustrator, Story Artist, and 3D Modeler for over 15 years.

The tips and advice shared in this book are aimed to help the reader create characters for an audience. For more than eight years now, he has enjoyed the privilege of mentoring countless artists reach their goals.

Leseprobe
Some of the most fun I had as a kid was not just drawing pictures, but imagining stories, ideas, and characters. Throughout life, that fun has only grown, and no doubt you've picked up this book because the same feeling rings true for you, too. Whether you want to create a career out of drawing and visual storytelling, or just want to express yourself through the imagined worlds and characters you create, you've found safe harbor here.The problem is that ideas are often the easiest part-how we execute those ideas, typically through drawing, requires building up a skill we may not have fully formed yet. Maybe we don't know how to tell a story people care about. Or, we're simply lacking the visual vocabulary to communicate who our characters are effectively. These three pillars of Character Design, namely DRAWING, STORY, and DESIGN, are built upon throughout this book-reinforcing and supporting each other so that you can become confident in your ability.While there are many ways to create characters, including 3D modeling and the like, this book seeks to help your drawing skills first and foremost. I have found that drawing is a discipline that helps things outside of the two dimensional. While I prefer to use digital tools for efficient drawing and illustrating, specifically the app Procreate on an iPad Pro, the majority of this book uses simple pencil and paper. The final chapter, which gets into color and rendering, uses examples from Procreate, however, most digital art apps utilize a similar system of layers and layer styles, which will translate fairly seamlessly. I encourage you to draw along with the Warm-ups and Exercises included, so that you can build your skills to meet your dreams.Character Design has not only been a tool that's let me work with major brands over the years, it's also helped me to make my own animated series and stories a reality. One of the characters from that series, Biko, will join you on your journey through this book. Character Design is a part of visual storytelling that is powerful-it transcends the medium it's a part of and creates a person in the mind of our viewer, one with a character and history like any real person. I hope this book makes that power a little more real to you. Enjoy!