Devotes some attention to designing and making benevolent movie creatures; also a lot of attention paid to designing movie monsters (scary creatures with ugly faces).

The world's best creature designers and concept artists provide a groundbreaking and unique insight into their creative processes and practices.

"Whether you're a professional artist interested in improving your drawing skills, or an aspiring designer fresh out of college looking to add to your portfolio, The Silver Way will help you build your confidence and strengthen your work in order to successfully design characters for any project, in any style. Chock-full of fun drawing techniques and easy-to-follow tutorials, The Silver Way is the kind of educational art book you'll revisit again and again for guidance, encouragement, and inspiration."--

Learn to make your characters unique, compelling and lifelike with these 75 exercises for all skill levels, including beginners. Topics include tools and materials; shapes; personalities; facial expressions; body language; character interaction; and costuming. Character types featured include more than just humans; learn how to draw animals, plants, creatures and more. Author Bev Johnson guides you through a variety of questions to explore not only the kinds of characters you want to create, but also the relationships between them, such as who their friends and enemies are, what their personality distinctions are, etc. so you can you can create truly interesting characters.

Zero in on the most cutting-edge trend in creature design for film and games: ZBrush! ZBrush allows you to develop a creature for film and games in realistic, 3D format. With this book, you will learn how to create a unique creature from start to finish and search for and repair any foreseeable problems. Clear instructions guide you through using Photoshop in combination with ZBrush to finely render a creature so you can see how it will appear on screen. Experienced ZBrush author and designer Scott Spencer shows you how to start with your concept in ZBrush as a preliminary digital model and then further refine it in Photoshop in order to fabricate a hyperrealistic image. Guides you through artistic concepts to visualize your creature Walks you through the process of conceptualizing a creature in ZBrush Details techniques for using Photoshop to refine your design Encourages you to use ZBrush as a sculpting and designing tool and then use Photoshop as a painting and finishing tool ZBrush Creature Design helps you bring your creature concepts to life.

When artists and designers explore or create a fictional setting, the milieu must be completely fleshed out, explained, and designed. In this book, comic and gaming art veteran Mark A. Nelson explores and demonstrates his methods for fashioning visually stunning, believable environments for fantasy creatures and characters. Scores of images and step-by-step examples illustrate how variation and experimentation lead to fresh, original designs for otherworldly beings, their environments, and their stories. Nelson discusses how to find ideas and borrow from history to add the strength of realism to a fantasy world. In describing the best ways to establish a habitat, he offers specifics about climate, terrain, flora, and wildlife. He shares insights into founding societies in terms of their means of survival, manner of warfare, spiritual practices, style of dress, and levels of technology. All visual creatives who work with imaginative material — illustrators, comic artists, and writers — will take a lively interest in this source of inspiration and practical knowledge. "In sixteen breezy-yet-surprisingly-concise chapters he covers everything from visual problem solving to spirituality to warfare to transportation, not with the idea of giving the reader lessons to copy by rote but rather as prompts to develop their own original concepts. If I were suggesting three books every budding artist should have at their fingertips they would be Figure Drawing for All It's Worth by Andrew Loomis, Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist by James Gurney, and, most definitely, Mark's Fantasy World-Building." — Muddy Colors

New series Character Design Collection features 50 expert artists using professional techniques and approaches to create a library of inspiring sketches.