Character Design Quarterly Book Review

A few weeks ago I saw that Izzy Burton, an illustrator based in Brighton, was talking about an article she had done for Character Design Quarterly. I hadn't heard of this magazine before but after some research, I realised it was the perfect type of magazine I was looking for so decided to order a few issues! CDQ is a magazine released quarterly, each edition focusing on an artist who produces the cover design, meet the artist sections and lots of useful insight into the narrative and designing characters with environments. 

This issue featured Izzy Burton who is an illustrator, director and animator who currently works as a lead artist at Netflix. The article talks through her creative process and juggling a passion for animation and illustration. I love how the book shows finished illustrations paired with her process and sketches of cover designs, showing how she came up with the composition through thumbnailing different angles and perspectives. This is something I struggle with so it's interesting to see how other people approach this. Also seeing how different perspectives can alter the atmosphere and mood, with the treehouse on the front cover off centre so the eye weaves around the piece before seeing the character. Burton shows a talent for balancing elements in the foreground and background, with branches in the foreground that help frame the scene and draw your eye in, a camera angle commonly used in animation as an establishing shot. 

Thumbnails for the cover design

Character designs and expressions

The page above was good to see how she approached facial expressions, using simple techniques like moving the eyebrows and creating wrinkles to make the character appear older. This helped add narrative and personality, showing the character is older but remains adventurous and hopeful with big round eyes. This is something I worked on during the character design project but want to improve, looking at ways to tell stories through their expression, proportions, colour scheme and clothing.

"You want your viewer to be drawn to the subject of your artwork and not be distracted by everything else."

-Izzy Burton

In terms of the book overall, it is clearly laid out with the contents page breaking down interviews and sections for each artist. I like how it doesn't cram loads of artists in per issue and only reach a surface level with each; instead, producing an in-depth review of their craft that gives the reader a much better insight into their way of working. I've always been a fan of these sort of behind-the-scenes books, having lots of 'Art of Disney' books in my collection so this one is good to see how artists stylise and figure out proportions when creating characters. 

Tim Probert character design

After Burton, it went into 'The Language of Shape' by Jennifer Yang then to Meet the Artist: Tim Probert. I liked his style of creating mythical characters like the ones below. Probert describes them as 'magical creatures that are full of prophecy and nonsense'. It's interesting to see how he took one simple shape and accentuated features like the teeth, size and distance between the eyes making some appear scarier or more endearing. 

Below are a few other pages from the book, I loved how varied the styles were and how each artist meticulously talked through their process from initial concepts to fully realised illustrations. My main takeaway was to start thinking about posing as it has such an impact on how the character is perceived and the way the audience views them- as seen in the girls dynamic posing with the 'Save our future' sign. It helps add impact and bring the character into focus. I'm thinking of getting the subscription soon as I prefer this style of magazine to any other I've reviewed like HiFructose or Juxtapoz, relating more to creating characters for a younger audience which is what I hope to do.