Book Review: Mythical Beasts: An Artist's Field Guide to Designing Fantasy Creatures

Here’s a fantastic book for artists who like to draw fantasy creatures and design their own.

This 320-page hardcover book features 30 artists who have contributed step-by-step tutorials on creature design.

Each artist talks about the research process and gathering of reference materials. That’s followed by the design process and iteration, and finally one design is chosen to be further developed. Each tutorial features the complete process from start to end. Note that all the artworks included are all sketches, even the final drawing is a sketch, just with colours added.

There’s a good variety of creatures featured, so there’s plenty to read and learn, especially from the writeup on the research and reference gathering stage.

Overall, it’s a really insightful book. Highly recommended to creature designers and artists who want to learn more about creature design.

Mythical Beasts: An Artist's Field Guide to Designing Fantasy Creatures is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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