I love reviewing art books - especially drawing books, since that's what my daughter enjoys the most. Because it's not a skill I'm strong at (she's better at drawing than I am) I love using art books to help her learn new techniques. I recently had the chance to review The Little Book of Cartooning & Illustration, from Walter Foster Publishing!
This book has a wide variety of tips from professional comic illustrators. They help readers build their own sense of style while learning the basics of drawing cartoons. It includes the ideas of squash and stretch, exaggerating details, anthropomorphizing inanimate objects, and creating faces with obvious expressions. It also helps readers work on body shapes and movement, and uses a variety of different body and face types so artists can experiment with what works for them. Not only does it work on the how-to of the art creation, but it also helps readers be original and create jokes and humor for their comics.
The book also has quite a few pages for practice. This is a really nice feature, especially for travel - only the book is necessary, no need for extra paper, and with drawing in a book, no additional hard surface is needed.
The book is a collaborative work with several professionals, which means there's a good variety of perspective and styles - but the book still makes a cohesive instructional guide.
Maury Aaseng has always been excited about drawing and art. His freelance work over the last eight years has spanned a variety of subject matter and styles. The range of his work has included anatomical illustration and cartoons for medical textbooks, informative illustrations for young adult nonfiction, custom watercolor work for independent authors, and logo design and creation. The variety has continued to fuel the creative spark that makes illustration work rewarding for him.
Clay Butler is the creator of the weekly alternative political comic strip Sidewalk Bubblegum. A darn good illustrator, cartoonist, graphic designer, web designer, concert photographer and writer, Clay has been working professionally since 1984.
Based out of Nottinghamshire, England, Jim Campbell is a professional comic-book letterer, one-time writer (perhaps again in the future!) and occasional artist (although his enthusiasm rather outstrips his actual ability).
Dan D'Addario has been drawing as far back as he can remember. Dan is an illustrator and caricaturist in Macomb Township, Michigan. His career spans almost 30 years as a graphic designer in the automotive field. From 1996 until 2008, Dan drew editorial cartoons for Crain's Detroit Business Magazine.
A native of the United Kingdom, cartoonist Alex Hallat has never had any art training--just a limited attention span, a love of comics, and a tendency to doodle in lectures at college. She started cartooning fulltime in 1999 and was immediately hired as the cartoonist for Brighton's daily newspaper. She has clients in the UK, New Zealand, and Australia and works with the American syndicate King Features, who distributes her comic strip, Arctic Circle.
Joe Oesterle is an award-winning writer and illustrator, but what he often fails to mention is that many of those awards were won on a New Jersey boardwalk, shooting a water pistol into the mouth of a plastic clown in an effort to be the first to pop the balloon.He has worked as the Art Director of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle apparel division, and performed double duty as Art Director and Senior Editor at the National Lampoon. Joe is especially proud of the fact that a humorous animated short he wrote, directed, and voiced has been on display at the Smithsonian Institution since 2001. Learn more at www.JoeArtistWriter.com.
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