Character Design Quarterly is a creative, bright, and engaging magazine for artists, animators, illustrators, and character designers of all levels.

With nostalgic glances to the past and visionary gazes into the future, Lynne Perrella and the contributing artists follow inspiration rather than tradition to present dolls that are charismatic, colorful and full of surprises. Technique related details are provided in each chapter's details dossier, where we are invited to go behind the scenes, into the artists studios. Take an up close and personal look to get the inside story on how the artists used paper and other exciting mediums to create their dolls. Artists include Nina Bagley, Lesley Riley, Judi Riesch, Lynn Whipple, Teesha Moore, Karen Michel, Jane Cather, Akira Blount, Laurel Hall and Maria Moya who expolore the human form to create paper personas that are expressive, innovative and insightful.

New life and opportunities arise from the wreckage of a north american city urban renewal at what cost? A new mother takes us on a tour of Hamilton, a Rust Belt city born of the Industrial Revolution and dying a slow death due to globalization. This mother represents the city’s next wave of inhabitants—the artists and young parents who swarm a run-down area for its affordability, inevitably reshaping the neighborhoods they take over. Creation looks at gentrification from the inside out—an artist mother making a home and neighborhood for her family, struggling to find her place amid the existing and emerging communities. While pushing her child’s stroller around Hamilton, Sylvia Nickerson shows us the warehouse filled with open barrels of toxic sludge, the parking lot where the city’s homeless population sleeps, and the refurbished Victorian house (complete with elegant chandeliers) that is now a state-of-the-art yoga studio. Creation presents the city as a living thing—a place where many small lives intersect and where death, motherhood, pollution, poverty, and violence are all interconnected. Drawn in evocative watercolor, Creation is unafraid to leave questions open-ended as Nickerson wanders the city and ponders just where the personal and the political intersect, and where they ought to intersect.New life and opportunities arise from the wreckage of a north american city urban renewal at what cost?

Matthew Thurber’s Art Comic is a blunt and hilarious assault on the swirling hot mess that is the art world. From sycophantic fans to duplicitous gallerists, fatuous patrons to self-aggrandizing art stars, he lampoons each and every facet of the eminently ridiculous industry of truth and beauty. Follow Cupcake, the Matthew Barney obsessive; Epiphany née Tiffany Clydesdale, the divinely inspired performance artist; Ivanhoe, a modern knight in search of artistic vengeance, and his squire, Turnbuckle. Each artist is more ridiculous than the last, yet they are tested and transformed by the even more absurd machinations of Thurber’s fantastical art world. Can the Free Little Pigs destroy this blighted system? Will “The Group” continue its indirect assassination of promising young artists? Can artistic integrity exist in this world amid the capitalist co-opting, petty rivalries, otherworldly portals, heavenly interventions, and murders at sea? Art Comic is brimming with references and cameos, outsize personalities and shuddering nonsense—Robert Rauschenberg smashes a beer bottle, Francesca Woodman, a wineglass. In the center of it all, Thurber’s twisted drawings and laugh-out-loud dialogue convey a complicated picture of an industry at the intersection of fantasy and reality. Part scathing condemnation, part irreverent appreciation, Thurber’s comics skewer the art world in a way only an art lover can.

The art world is tough, the rules are a mystery, and only the lucky ew make money' - so how can galleries succeed? What makes a commercial art gallery successful? How do galleries get their marketing right? Which potential customer group is the most attractive? How best should galleries approach new markets while still serving their existing audiences? Based on the results of an anonymous survey sent to 8,000 art dealers in the US, UK, and Germany, Magnus Resch?s insightful examination of the business of selling art is a compelling read that is both aspirational and practical in its approach.