Draw With Jazza - Creating Characters by Josiah Brooks Review: A Structured, Genre-Spanning Character Design Guide

Draw With Jazza – Creating Characters is a how-to guide published by IMPACT Books in November 2016. Written by Josiah "Jazza" Brooks — an artist and animator who founded his Draw with Jazza YouTube channel in 2012 to share self-taught techniques in character design, illustration, and animation — the book is designed to give readers a repeatable method for inventing original characters. Its stated scope is broad: sci-fi and steampunk settings, comic book heroines, tattooed action heroes, animal familiars, alien races, and beyond. The intended output spans comic books, cartoons, and video games, positioning the guide as a cross-format resource rather than a single-medium tutorial.

The book's organizational backbone is a four-stage design process built around what Brooks calls the "four Ds": Discover (exploring ideas, themes, and visual styles), Design, Develop, and Deliver. Sections move through brainstorm sketching, body refinement, working with color, genre and setting, character archetypes, using stereotypes as a design shorthand, and finally production-ready outputs — including head turnarounds, full-body turnarounds, expression sheets, pose sheets, and character variants. A worked example, Quaid the Space Captain, carries readers through the full pipeline, grounding abstract instruction in a concrete walkthrough.

Brooks built his YouTube channel into a large educational community before the book's publication, and the guide grew directly out of that platform's ethos: accessible, self-taught technique shared in a structured, step-by-step format. IMPACT Books, an imprint with a catalog focused on cartooning, comics, and sequential art instruction, is the publisher — a natural home for a guide of this type. The book extends Brooks's reach beyond video, offering a reference that readers can annotate, revisit, and work from at their own pace, complementing the channel rather than simply replicating it.

The subject matter — character design from concept to finished reference sheet — sits at the intersection of several popular creative fields, and the guide addresses aspiring creators who want to design original characters for visual storytelling in any medium, not only traditional comics.

The book's clearest strength is its systematic design framework. Rather than teaching isolated drawing tricks, it walks readers through a complete pipeline — from initial brainstorm sketching through genre and setting decisions, archetype selection, body refinement, color work, and the production of professional-standard character sheets. This end-to-end structure gives the guide coherence that purely technique-focused cartooning books can lack.

The genre range is another genuine asset. Brooks explicitly addresses settings as varied as steampunk, sci-fi, and fantasy, and character types spanning heroines, action figures, and non-human races. For a reader building a comic, game, or animated series populated by diverse characters, this breadth is more useful than a narrower focus would be. The inclusion of chapters on character archetypes and the deliberate use of stereotypes as a design starting point also signals that the book engages with storytelling logic, not just draftsmanship.

As with any instructional art book, the proof of the method lies in hands-on application — something an editorial review cannot assess directly. What the record supports is that the book is structured to guide readers through a defined, reproducible process written out step by step. Reader commentary surfaced through retail and platform listings suggests the content is considered worth the investment by those returning to drawing, though individual results will vary with the reader's existing skill level and commitment to working through the exercises.

The book targets beginner-to-intermediate creators. Readers with significant prior training in character design or professional illustration experience may find the foundational framing covers ground they already know well. The guide's positioning as "fun and easy" also signals that it prioritizes accessibility over depth, which is the right call for its audience but means advanced technique is not the book's focus.

Draw With Jazza – Creating Characters is best suited to self-taught artists, hobbyists, and students who want a clear, genre-flexible system for character design and have little formal training in the design process. Fans of Brooks's YouTube channel will find the book a complementary reference — one that formalizes and extends the accessible instructional voice of the channel into a format that supports repeated, exercise-driven use. Aspiring comic book artists, indie game developers building visual assets, and animation students sketching out original casts are all within the book's target audience. Those seeking deep, discipline-specific technical training in anatomy or advanced rendering will need to look elsewhere, but for anyone wanting a reliable, repeatable framework for bringing original characters to life across genres, this guide delivers a well-organized starting point.