Digital Character Design and Painting

By Don Seegmiller

Charles River Media, 2003

7¼" x 9¼", 354 pages

I had this book on my shelves since 2004. At that time I was learning how to use Painter and I found nice tips and tricks in it. Recently, because I'm designing characters for a short animation, I decided to read this book and see what I could get from it.

The book is divided into three sections: Character Design, Artistic Principles for a Digital Age and Digital Painting.

The Character Design section is rather skim. There are a series of questions that a character designer should ask himself about a character when designing it such as "how will the character be used?", "how big or small is the character relative to the others?", "is the character simple or complex?", etc. Those questions could easily hold on a one sheet in point form instead of in a whole chapter. Then there are some advises such as using symbols, visiting special places for inspirations, using humor, exageration, satire, parody, etc. There are several of those advises in a chapter of a few pages. Then there is the famous advise of creating the character story. And, finally, there is a chapter on the physical representation of the character. There are very, very few illustrations to accompany this section and the text alone just touches on each topic so I found this section bordering uselessness.

The Artistic Principles for a Digital Age section contains traditional artistic principles period. Concepts such as general hue zones in faces, use of values, colors, lighting, edges and textures are very commont art concepts and they do apply to any artistic age. Not just digital age. If there is anything digital there it is in the use of 3D applications to illustrate the lighting principles and paint application to make textures. This section is filled with usefull illustrations though. But specifically for character design, this section is not much usefull.

The third section "Digital Painting" constitutes the bulk of the book. This section consists of several chapters, each showing how to paint an eye, hair or a specific character. Each of those chapters is broken down into a long serie of numbered steps that tries to follow the painting method that is used by the author. While there are several good tips for using Painter in those steps, I don't think someone can learn to paint by following someone else's steps as closely as that.

In conclusion, after reading this book, I don't feel I've progressed in any ways concerning the task of designing a character for animation. This is really a "how-to" book on using Painter that uses character design as a pretext. The somewhat usefull advises about artistic principles can be gathered elsewhere inclusing freely on the Web and the character design section looks like it was added as an afterthought.