Animation Sketchbooks

It is interesting to see the variety of ways that animators plan within their sketchbooks and to have an insight into their ideas and planning behind the animations. I will use this on the animation degree course that I teach on.

As an animator, I'm biased. But that said, this is one of the more inspiring books I've read and I don't think that would be different if I weren't an animator. It is also a beautifully presented book, with interesting interviews with/comments from the animators themselves. Highly highly recommended!

I love this book so much! The different styles shown throughout are all so inspiring and quirky. Definitely the book to get if you are interested in anything to do with art or animation!

I own quite a few books about sketchbooks and work in the animation industry, so when I saw this I felt quite excited. However when I received it disappointment soon followed.When you look at the pages it soon becomes apparent it's a bad representation of what animators can do. Most of the artwork is something you might expect from GCSE students and I didn't feel convinced a lot of the contents was even from sketchbooks. Also the artwork seemed to show very little about how it related to animation, they could have related to anything. From my experiences of animators they tend to show great creativity and draftsmanship. This book showed little of that, with hardly any examples of storyboards, strong character development or just animator's working out problems on the page.There were some exceptions, like Luis Cook's work on the Pearce Sisters, but these examples were few and far between.I sent it back as it felt shoddy and an insult to good independent animators.

Animation Sketchbooks is a weighty tome. It's a visual feast of drawings, doodles, notes and the germs of ideas from some of the most important people working in animation today. A must for any animation enthusiast or practising animator.

Your browser does not support HTML5 video.  There seems to be two publishers for this title. Chronicle Books are publishing it with the orange cover, and probably for distributing in USA. Thames & Hudson publishes it with a red cover and distributes it for Europe. So the price of the book will vary depending on where you buy it.Animation Sketchbooks follows in the same format as  Comics Sketchbooks: The Private Worlds of Today's Most Creative Talents  and  Graphic: Inside the Sketchbooks of the World's Great Graphic Designers . It features the sketchbooks of creative individuals, in this case, those who work for animation, not necessarily just artists.50 creatives are featured and with 320 pages, it still means that the coverage for each person is quite limited. The text comes in the form of quotes plus a short profile on who they are, what they do and have created. There's not much text. The focus of the book is on showing the insides of their sketchbooks.The sketchbook pages come in the form of sketches, collages and doodles. A lot are random musings.It's difficult for me to understand the purpose of the book, probably as a pool of random sketchbook pages to dive into. The text doesn't talk much about animation and the sketchbook pages aren't necessarily linked to animation.If you want to check out more work, there's a listing of websites at the back of the book. These are the featured:Nancy AndrewsLilli CarréMartha ColburnLuis CookSuzanne DeakinJo DeryPaul DriessenFélix Dufour-LaperrièreAdam ElliotJanie GeiserPhilippe GrammaticopoulosPierre-Luc GranjonBrent GreenLaura HeitIsabel HergueraDon HertzfeldtChris HintonJonathan HodgsonStephen IrwinAvish KhebrehzadehFran KrauseRaimund KrummeSimone MassiMiwa MatreyekFlorence MiailheMirai MizueDavid OReillyOsbert ParkerPriit PärnMichaela PavlátováRegina PessoaDavid PolonskyJeff ScherAllison SchulnikGeorges SchwizgebelMaureen SelwoodDash ShawDavid ShrigleyCat SolenStacey SteersSteven SubotnickChris SullivanMalcolm SutherlandJim TrainorRee TreweekPaul VesterJ. J. VillardChel WhiteRun WrakeKoji Yamamura(See more pictures of the book on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)