Tragic pasts, secret identities, compelling personalities � the best character designs are built on these essential factors! This ultimate guide shows readers how to create costumes that reflect their characters� powers, how to design a team of characters with interesting group dynamics, and how backstory can contribute to a character�s flaws and strengths. Using classic designs, poses, and powers as references, readers will create their own unique characters. They�ll learn essential drawing skills, such as anatomy and basic color theory. Simple step-by-step instructions and tips from professional artists guide readers through the design process while encouraging creativity. Diverse character references combined with classic poses, powers, and paneling tips make this amazing book a valuable addition to any library.

After a noteworthy career with "Superman", "Indiana Jones" and "Deadly Foes of Spiderman", the work of well-known, veteran, comic-book artist Kerry Gammill mysteriously disappeared from the pages of "Superman" and "X-Men". This volume reveals the reason for Gammill's exodus - to fulfil a life-long desire to work on monster films. He has been working as a conceptual artist on film and television projects which include "Stephen King's Storm of the Century" TV mini-series, "Virus" (1999), "Species II" (1998), "Can of Worms" (TV 1999), Dean Koontz's "Phantoms" (1998), "Stargate SG-1" TV series, and "The Outer Limits" TV series. In this volume Gammill takes us behind the scenes on the very important but little-known world of film conceptual art with a focus on designing creatures for action films. This is not just a "how to" book, but also Gammill's autobiographic career retrospective, filled with art and anecdotes about his years at Marvel, DC and Hollywood.

Every superhero has a special power--and now you can capture it on the page! This comprehensive drawing handbook covers all aspects of creating your own unique comic-book characters, whether they're good or evil, muscular or mutant, a creature of flight or a martial artist. It delves into materials, composition, and perspective; mastering classic poses and costumes; adapting basic figures; depicting movement and strength; and drawing accessories.

Thanks to Christopher Hart's simplified process, anyone can create dynamic cartoon characters right away. He has developed the easiest-ever approach to drawing the basics like heads, bodies, and those super-important cartoon expressions. Hart helps beginners apply these fundamentals to a variety of fun types and settings including animals, under-the-sea locales, stock characters, and popular backgrounds. Each lesson is laid out in accessible steps, accompanied by Chris's personable instruction.

Rediscover—or discover for the first time—the things that make you passionate in life Vital Signs is about what inspires passion and what defeats it. How we lose it and how we get it back. And ultimately it’s about the endless yet endlessly fruitful tug-of-war between freedom and domestication, the wild in us and the tame, our natural selves and our conditioned selves. Each chapter in Vital Signs will contain a core sample, an intimate biography of one of the strategies we employ to gain or regain our passion. The book also affirms the importance of courageous inquiry into dispassion—where we’re numb, depressed, stuck, bored—so the reader can recognize and change these tendencies in themselves.

This working toolbook is meant to be drawn in, colored over, and read. Included are tips and pointers on every page--written by the Marvel pros themselves--as well as a pencil and four double-nibbed color markers, stored in a bound-on zippered vinyl pouch.