Creating Stylized Animals: How to design compelling real and imaginary animal characters

by 3dTotal Publishing (Editor)

Unlock the secrets to creating stylized animals that enchant and entertain their audience, resulting in characters that follow in the popular paw-prints of much-loved creatures from Disney, DreamWorks, Pixar, and other great studios. Creating Stylized Animals focuses on the art and craft of developing stylized characters from the animal kingdom, both real and imagined. Some of the best professional illustrators and animators dedicated to creating characters for video games, TV, and books, guide the reader through accessible step-by-step tutorials. These experts create specially commissioned animals, demonstrating their process from the all-important research stage and experimenting with thumbnails, to manipulating shape language, exploring gesture, and assessing color palettes. Animal-focused design fundamentals include anatomy and anthropomorphism, and how to imbue these animals with the personality and characteristics essential to capturing the attention of audiences of all ages. This book is perfect for artists of all mediums, ensuring newcomers to drawing the animal kingdom are equipped with the skills and knowledge they need to create their own eye-catching characters. Whether tasked with creating an adorable comedy critter to captivate the audience, or an imaginary creature to carry an adventure-packed narrative, this book is the artist’s best friend from start to finish.

Genres: Art

280 pages, Paperback

Published May 25, 2021

About the author

Originally a digital artist’s resource website, 3dtotal has grown into an industry-leading art-book publisher. Renowned for creating high-quality, inspirational, and practical tutorial books with some of the best artists working in the movie, games, animation, and publishing industries, 3dtotal Publishing sets the standard for modern art books.

Reviews

[Echo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good book, I definitely recommend it to anyone looking to improve their character design skills ! The variety of styles from the featured artists, as well as their personal tips on chara designs are great, and I bet this will also be a good source of inspiration in the future.

[Daniela Miranda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly, excellent.

I learned some great techniques in here, and the description of the process was incredibly thorough.

I liked the different characters at the end, and how the illustrators walked us through the process of just building a base character by brainstorming, to then taking and transforming that base character to fit different briefs!

The variety of art styles and contributors in here also makes it extra special and provides a look at how different people approach a similar task.

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jam packed with knowledge and beautiful illustrations.