Book Review: Principles of Creature Design: Creating Imaginary Animals

This is the other book that goes with Science of Creature Design: Understanding animal anatomy.

If you bought the book thinking that you're going to learn creature design principles, then you'll be sorely disappointed. There aren't much instructions in the book. There's a one page introduction to each chapter that talks about her approach to drawing creatures but that's about it. The text that accompanies the artworks mostly talk about the story that's created to go with the creatures.

You should just treat this humongous 228-page artbook as a portfolio artbook because that's just what it is. The designs are look believable and are really beautiful. It's very inspiring to look at the amount of high quality artworks included.

Utlimately, if you want to learn how to draw, you won't get much from this book or the other book mentioned above. And that to me is a wasted opportunity because I'm pretty sure Terryl Whitlatch really has a lot to teach.

My recommendation. Buy it for the art and not the instructions.

Principles of Creature Design: creating imaginary animals is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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