Chuck shares his experience as creative artist in this book. He perfectly blends theory and practice by proposing alternatives way to learn. This book is amazing!

As a figurative artist I can't praise enough this book, exceptionally good for boosting imagination and creativity. Every draftsman knows that you need countless hours of drawing in order to be a better artist, it can be boring and it might be difficult to free your imagination. Not with this book: the idea is that you play a game with dices in order to find random new associations (for example emotions and actions). It challenges your ability every time, I bet it boosts creativity.
All the sections are very good: expressions and emotions, archetypes, costumes, anatomy crash course, antropomorph creatures, all this with a good dose of humour. Highly recommended.

My attraction to this book started with the cover, it's an art related book, so I want eye candy. Luckily it didn't stop with the cover, the content is beautifully presented and there are a lot of images. From the 144 pages this book has, about only 5 don't have illustrations (and I'm counting the index and title page as two of them).

This book is meant to teach you how to create original characters (humans and creatures) by paying attention to emotions and their different facial expressions, behaviors, archetypes, age, costume design and cultural background. Every page is filled with drawing lessons so that you can conveying attitudes, emotions and overall make your characters more interesting and accurate to what you want to transmit. It also has mini lessons on drawing basics: human anatomy, folds and fabric, drawing from life and reference, silhouetting and exercises to hone your skills.

A new use for your RPG dices

What makes this book special, is that it incorporates gaming!. There are boxes all over the book with themed, enumerated lists (for example, emotions, expressions, actions, occupations). Each one says the type and number of dices you will need for each given box and by combining different boxes you can create random characters that will challenge your creativity and make you explore new possibilities. For those of you who have enjoyed role play games and want to create original characters, you are going to love this approach. It can be a great way to have fun and create drawing challenges with other people and at the same time develop your skills.

*I requested an eArc from F+W Media – Impact via NetGalley (Thank you!) and then bought my copy via Wordery.

Combine creative elements to craft your own fantasy characters!

Fantasy Character Genesis is a neat art craft book that helps artists craft new fantasy characters using a 20 sided die, and random word lists to mix emotion, behaviours, culture, costumes, and the like. Ok, honesty, I requested this book because I thought it was a writingcraft book. Once I realised my mistake, after being miffed it wasn't what I'd thought, I dove in and found it quite enjoyable. It was neat to mix and match things even if I can't draw them as well. I think this would be of greatest interest to those who are already established artists.

***Many thanks to Netgalley and F+W Media Publishing for providing an egalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.