Fantasy Characters & Creatures: An Artist's Sourcebook: Whimsical Beasts, Anthropomorphic Monsters and More! (With over 600 illustrations)

I discovered Satoshi Matsuura's original book in Japan and purchased it immediately, despite not knowing Japanese. I really love his illustrations and creativity, so I was excited when the English version was announced and I preordered.Not only is the text in English, but the illustrations are larger and more colorful because of the glossier paper stock. So if you have the Japanese version, the English version could be considered an upgrade.For those not familiar, Satoshi Matsuura is a talented character artist. This book is filled with hundreds of clever, whimsical, and imaginative characters — a creature codex.Each character consistently has an English and Japanese name and a tiny silhouette — an important part of unique character design.Each category has 10-60 characters. Some of the categories include dragons, reptiles, sea creatures, beast warriors, human warriors, yokai, zombies, and even plant and food monsters. It's an impressive amount of work and very inspiring.I especially like the section of the book where he explains his design process. There's really valuable information on finding information, defining silhouettes and negative space, shading, coloring, etc. There are about 12 pages in this section, so very useful insight and techniques for artists and art lovers.If you appreciate character design, I highly recommend this catalog of creatures. It's in my top 5 art books.

Often when buying art books the advice that comes with them is generic! In this book Satoshi gives actual practical advice: a solid investment! Gorgeous design great advice!

A really, really great book to generate new ideas. Lots of shaped-based silhouettes and unique usage of negative space. Even each character has a small image with just their shadows to show this! The artist's creative process is explained in detail and with accompanying pictures to demonstrate how earlier iterations were adjusted and improved on.As a content warning, there are bare breasts for some of the characters. Doesn't bother me, but might make unaware parents upset.

This book has tons of excellent character designs and ideas. I like the cartoony feelings that comes with each drawing. They remind me of Vanillaware's Muramasa.

Las ilustraciones son hermosas y los detalles son fantásticos

I am a fan and all the character designs are awesome.However, kind of disappointed by the low resolution of kindle version.It is like a pdf of highly compressed jpg images.

El libro está bien 10/10, su envío no tanto, al no tener algún film que lo agarre el libro llega con esquinas deterioradas y alguna doblez, podría mejorarse la protección de los libros

Awesome book, full of a lot of useful designs and creative processes. It's just a pity that the english edition's cover isn't as cool as the eastern ones.

The 16 year old that received this for his birthday, loved it as he is currently doing character design and would like to be a game developer as a career. I am always trying to encourage him to follow this dream and not end up doing a job he hates as does happen to a lot of creative people. Five stars

This guys illustrations are fantastic and are genuinely a joy to look at, I’m excited to start incorporating bits of his style into my own artworks! (I adore how he uses blacks for shadows, excellent stuff)

Really aesthetically pleasing designs are inspiring and fun to look at, well worth the money.