Book Review: Action! Cartooning by Ben Caldwell

Action! Cartooning is filled with great tips and tricks when it comes to drawing characters. It talks about facial features, exaggeration, posing, character design and construction. Troughout the book there are mainly sketches, not polished renderings or finished line art. However the art presented is very, very good.

Ben Caldwell's style is very dynamic, it is very edgy and angular. It looks as if you would mix a disney character with some marvel super hero characters. If you look at the art presented, you can see, that he has a great sense for design and a lot of knowledge about human anatomy.

So is this the only book you'll ever need? No, definitely not. Don't get me wrong it's an amazing book, it has awesome art and great tips. But altough it looks simple, the art is very sophisticated, so it may not be the best book for a beginner. The texts troughout the book are rather short tips than long written explanations.

You should get the book anyway, and you could copy some of those drawings. But being able to replicate that style in your own designs, takes years and years of practice and a lot of knowledge about design and human anatomy. So get your lazy ass of the couch and start practicing.

With that said, it is one of those rare cartooning books that has high quality art and high quality tips.

So don't miss out on this one, but do not be discouraged if you can't reproduce what you see in the book :). By the time I'm writing this, the book costs 9$ on Amazon, that's a freaking steal, you should probably donate something to Ben Caldwell ;)

Here is the link the book:

And here's a flip trough of the book:

The next review will be about Ben Caldwell's second book Fantasy Cartooning. After that I think I will do some reviews about animation books, but I'm not sure yet.
If someone wants a review for a specific books, add a comment. You could check out the picture I had take of my bookshelf. If your desired book is on my shelf, the chances might be could ;)