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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. Professional artists from a variety of media offer their experience through additional commentary. These include Marcus Hamilton ( Dennis the Menace ), Terry Dodson ( X-Men ), Bobby Rubio (Pixar), Sean "Cheeks" Galloway (Spiderman animated), and more. With a foreword by comicbook artist Adam Hughes, who has produced work for DC, Marvel Comics, Lucasfilm, Warner Bros. Pictures, and other companies.
162 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2012
26 people are currently reading
296 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 16, 2012
Character Mentor is sort of an extension of Tom Bancroft's earlier book
The first book focuses on the actual designing of characters. This book focuses on bringing the characters to life with body language, specifically by using expressions, poses and staging. In other words, this book is about acting using your characters.
It's filled with tips and insights, just like the first book. As the book title suggest, the teaching style here is one of mentoring. There are many assignments included, and Tom Bancroft has included his students' work, together with his mentor notes on the different ways to improve the result. You'll feel the years of experience seeping through the pages as he explains. It's all very simple and practical tips you can use to improve your characters instantly.
There are many wonderful illustrated examples in the book to show how important acting is to creating believability. One look at them and you'll be able to guess accurately how the character is feeling, who the character is or what the scene is about. These are all done without dialogue. The goal of the book is to impart the knowledge of getting to that level of clarity with your characters, the same sort of clarity you would expect from a masterful silent movie.
The book also includes a section on composition. It teaches you how to frame your scene with your characters to better tell a story. While this section is not technically character design, it's still useful knowledge. Several guest artists are also invited to have a go at an assignment. Artists such as Stephen Silver, Sean Galloway, Terry Dodson, etc. You get to see how their interpret the story scene in their own way.
This is an insightful book to character design. It's a great addition and supplements the first book well. Recommended to artists with some basic knowledge on character design, which is to say you should check out Creating Characters with Personality if you haven't done so.
September 17, 2019
Книжка вийшла у 2012, а таке враження, що десь в 50-х. Проте є багато корисних інсайтів по позах та виразах лиць.
January 18, 2015
The thing I liked about this book, compared to so many other instructional books, is that the author took many contributed examples of student work and outlined the various issues those had before demonstrating how to improve on them.
Rather than just delivering the perfect example with each tutorial, Bancroft shows the mistakes, how to spot them and improve them, and in doing so reflects the reality of learning any art form, of starting simply and working to improve.
More instructional books should be written this way!
Rather than just delivering the perfect example with each tutorial, Bancroft shows the mistakes, how to spot them and improve them, and in doing so reflects the reality of learning any art form, of starting simply and working to improve.
More instructional books should be written this way!
June 13, 2021
Great book, lots of wonderful examples.
August 6, 2015
This is hard to rate?? Since I've been drawing and reading art books a long time, I didn't learn many new things here, but this could be a valuable book for someone just getting into the craft. It's easy and simple to understand with some great examples throughout.
October 24, 2012
I loved Tom Bancroft's first book on character design and this one is an advanced follow-up. I love this one as well and it was worth the money. What I've learned from it has improved my drawings greatly.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
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