Reddit reviews Creating Characters with Personality: For Film, TV, Animation, Video Games, and Graphic Novels

It sounds more like you want to do drawing based things. You probably want to learn about character design at some point. There are two basic schools of thought on it. There is the overall silhouette concept artist style. One of the books that you can study from for that is The Skillful Huntsman. This style of drawing creation is also used by a lot of concept artists for games and special effects. The other school of thought is the shaped based drawings. You can learn about that in Creating Characters With Personality. This basic breakdown is used by a lot of the more cartoony styled artists. They both relate to each other and the shape breakdown helps you turn a character in space. It is essentially a more detailed version of the Preston Blair method.

Either way, you won't get too far if you don't understand your anatomy, life drawing, and drapery. So if you aren't there yet, and you can never get enough of that as a traditional artist, you may want to do the remedial learning to draw things such as Drawing on the Right Side Of The Brain and hand copying an Anatomy for Artists Textbook of your choice.

Here are a few books that have helped me over the years.

http://www.amazon.com/Keys-Drawing-Bert-Dodson/dp/0891343377

http://www.amazon.com/Draw-Looney-Tunes-Dan-Romanelli/dp/B0032FO6G4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330652405&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Characters-Personality-Animation-Graphic/dp/0823023494/ref=pd_sim_b_13

http://www.amazon.com/Vilppu-Drawing-Manual-Glenn/dp/1892053039/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330652274&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Force-Dynamic-Drawing-Animators-Second/dp/0240808452/ref=pd_sim_b_11


Also, there's some other books that are out of print that you can download: http://alexhays.com/loomis/ also really great stuff there.

In a hurry, but here's the Amazon links, plus one extra book I have that I enjoyed. You could also try to see if there are websites with tutorials, but alli have on hand are free artist middle sites. Still useful.


https://smile.amazon.com/Action-Cartooning-Ben-Caldwell/dp/0806987391/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1523044934&sr=8-1&keywords=Ben+caldwell

https://smile.amazon.com/Fantasy-Cartooning-Ben-Caldwell/dp/1402716125/ref=pd_bxgy_14_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1402716125&pd_rd_r=E8D678XWKG9J60492XEX&pd_rd_w=aQYUw&pd_rd_wg=IndA3&psc=1&refRID=E8D678XWKG9J60492XEX

https://smile.amazon.com/Creating-Characters-Personality-Animation-Graphic/dp/0823023494/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_3?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0823023494&pd_rd_r=3Q39HZMCBFVSQ2SHZGEW&pd_rd_w=JXQC5&pd_rd_wg=bs3Cl&psc=1&refRID=3Q39HZMCBFVSQ2SHZGEW


Here's a model site that allows you to choose clothes or nude and even set up a gesture playlist. One thing you do in art school drawing class is try to capture fast poses in 15-sec to a minute poses--no detail, just a good loose impression of a figure that expresses the motion of the pose. It's good practice and a good way to loosen up before drawing.

https://www.quickposes.com/en/library

this covers the difference between male and female facial features briefly, but well. You can get it anywhere (used in most cases) and it's got a lot of other good info in it.

The nose is really the only critique I have about the drawing, overall it looks phenomenal.

Read, read, read!

Tom Bancroft's "Creating Characters"

Richard Williams' "Animator Survival Kit"

That should be a good place to start! And it never hurts to trace. That's how I learn.

Tom Bancroft books are a good place to start: http://www.amazon.com/Character-Mentor-Example-Expressions-Characters/dp/0240820711 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0823023494/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_WQdTub1XMGW3X

Honestly it just comes down to how well you know the structure and functions of each aesthetic part of the body (meaning ignoring underlying invisible muscles). The more you understand anatomy and structure, the more you'll understand what the basic shape of each piece is, the easier and more effective it'll be to simplify it into an appealing shape. So googling anatomy and anatomy tutorials and Glenn Vilppu will go a long way with that!

Also, approaching it from a design point of view will help understand how to take those basic shapes of anatomy and make them appealing. Tom Bancroft has a great book on design that will help you out there. Mostly focus on negative/positive shape, appealing shapes, line of action/flow, and proportion and that'll take you a long way as well. Google design principles!

Finally, just look at your favorite artists and try and figure out what makes it so appealing. Experiment with their designs! If they have a character who's cute and you think it's because the eyes are big and the nose is small and the features are pushed down on the face, what if you moved the features higher up the face? What if the eyes were smaller? Nose bigger? Face wider? Etc etc, just experiment and be creative and try new things!