Character Design Crash Course: Designing Animal Characters

Welcome to Character Design Crash Course, a series of illustration classes meant for beginning cartoonists or intermediate character artists looking for a refresher. In this class I'll take you through my entire process of designing and illustrating an animal character, starting with finding inspiration and reference, then moving on to sketching and developing your concept, and finally, rendering it in Adobe Photoshop. I'll also talk about the fundamentals of character design, and the importance of using reference and learning from other artists. 

What You'll Learn

• Finding Inspiration and Learning from Other Artists: I'll talk about studying the styles of other artists, how it helps you build your versatility, and the importance of being influenced by more than one artist.
• Using Reference: I'll talk about why using reference is key to improving your drawing skills, the best ways to use it to benefit yourself, and why it's particularly essential when designing animal characters. 
• Developing Your Character: from rough sketches to more developed concepts
• Rendering in Photoshop: blocking in base colors manually and with the pen tool, using the radial gradient tool to shade and highlight, using paths to make selections, and how paths and the lasso tool can aid in coloring
• Color Adjustment and Texture: how to use color adjustments and texture tools to add interest to your drawing

What You'll Make

Once finished, you'll have a fully illustrated animal character to add to your portfolio. :D

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Adobe, and Adobe Photoshop are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe in the United States and/or other countries.

ASSIGNMENT

To design and illustrate an animal character of your choosing.

• Step 1: finding inspiration and reference
• Step 2: rough sketching and developing concepts
• Step 3: rendering (traditionally, in Photoshop, or the digital art program of your choosing)

Your goal is to create a fun character that you can include in your portfolio!

DELIVERABLE

Your project should include your fully illustrated animal character, as well as your rough sketches and varied designs. Feel free to post pictures or screenshots of your illustration process along the way. 

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

• The Golden Ratio in Character Design
• Schoolism - Characters for Animated Film with Daniel Arriaga
• Silver Drawing Academy - character designer and teacher
• David Colman - character designer
• Charley Harper - modern artist
• Character Design References Blog - Galleries, art references, tutorials and interviews from established and young promising artists in animation, movies, games, comics and illustration
• Character Design References Pinterest Boards 
• Kecky's Magical Brushes - includes the soft crosshatching texture brush that I used throughout

RECOMMENDED BOOKS

• The Art of Animal Drawing: Construction, Action Analysis, Caricature by Ken Hultgren
• Animals in Motion by Eadweard Muybridge
• The Silver Way: Techniques, Tips, and Tutorials for Effective Character Design by Stephen Silver