Book Review: Character Mentor by Tom Bancroft

Character Mentor is the second book by Tom Bancroft. His first book Creating Characters with Personality was about designing characters, which I consider, as mentioned in the previous post, the best book on the subject of all times.

Now in the continuation it's all aboutposing and staging your already developed characters. If you do character design for games or animation a model sheet is required for coworkers to model or draw the character properly. That's the sole purpose of a model sheet. The characters do look very stiff and lifeless cause the drawings on the model sheet are usually ortographic drawings of the characters from different viewing angles.

However if youwant to present your character to a client and sell the concept you need to show the character in an interesting pose, maybe in an environment, also showing expressions.

That is what this book is going to teach you. It shows how to add expression, How to create interesting poses that add life to a character. It also tells how to avoid common errors such as bad silhouettes, twinning and lack of spatial depth.

What I learned from the book was, how much difference a little head tilt can make or a subtle change in expression. The book is truly amazing!!! 

As in the previous book there's again an assigment given to professional artists (e.g. Stephen Silver) and the results and their solutions are presented troughout the book. The task this time was to draw a girl texting in her room while a shadowy figure watches her from outside the window. Here's the link to the book: Character Mentor: Learn by Example to Use Expressions, Poses, and Staging to Bring Your Characters to Life

Here's a flip trough of the book: