Action! Cartooning

Rating:
Summary: Great book, great artist!
Review: "Action!Cartooning", by Ben Caldwell, is a great book on drawing cartoon figures. I am a professional caricaturist myself (I own caricature concessions in a major theme park, and wrote the book "Let's Toon CARICATURES"), and a lot of the info Ben gives about "pushing" the characteristics of your characters, in order to give a clear, instant insight into their personalities, can be applied to caricaturing as well. There's a lot of great things about this book, and a lot of beautiful drawings. If you want to learn to draw good, cartoony action figures, then this is the book for you. It is so much better than any other cartoon or comic book anatomy books on the market, that is isn't even funny. I have recommended it to all of the artists I work with, and many other artist friends, already. I'd like to know what else Ben's done, because I'd love to see more of his work!

Rating:
Summary: A good starting point for young artists
Review: Action! Cartooning is a comprehensive and well-organized drawing course likely to appeal to Saturday morning cartoon fans. This book thoroughly covers the fundamentals of cartoon anatomy, facial features, expressions, and action poses typically found in American-style animation and adventure comics designed for young audiences. Full of tips on how to improve rendering of specific parts of the human body from different angles and several pointers on how illustrate different body types and age groups, it provides all the basic tools a beginner artist might need to create his or her own original cast of cartoon characters. Bundled with some basic sketching supplies (also covered in the Materials section), this book would be a great gift for any budding artist.

Rating:
Summary: Wow!
Review: I've bought this book, read it (noticing some instructional
errors - but nothing you can self-correct) and started to draw
(rather copy) the examples. The results: Self-satisfaction.

This is a good book to start with if you plan to animate
action cartoons in the future (on paper or on the computer).

After I draw all the examples in this book, it would be a good
excercise to use Mr. Caldwell's principles and draw my own
characters.

I wish though that this book had examples on non-human characters
like robots, machines, animals, aliens, monsters, etc.

Another book of this nature perhaps, Mr. Caldwell?