Where it goes off of the drawing, it doesn't really matter because, again, I can't draw over that part because my layer is locked. Plus, particularly, if you want to work in animation, you have to be able to adapt to different styles. I demonstrated how you can set up your radial gradient tool in another tutorial I did so I'm going to go ahead and play that. You can actually just really easily change the opacity by hitting 3 on your keyboard, which will bring it to 30 and 2 will bring it to 20, etc. Once finished, you'll have a fully illustrated animal character to add to your portfolio. They've got creature anatomy, various different specific types of creature anatomy. I'm naming mine RHINO BODY. His animals are sort of realistic but anthropomorphized. And if you are having trouble coming up with character ideas, try our Random Character Generator! I just have one more fun technique to show you and it's a shading technique that I use. It creates a circle. I'm also turning off the sketch layer so I can see it a little better. Hi! 8. I love that there's realistic wolves in here, as well as some really exaggerated and pushed designs. Over here you can rename your path. Once you've done that, move on to less generic designs and create as much variety as you can. And finally, Charles Harper. What you need to do is double-click on the actual box itself and it brings up the Gradient Editor, and it's got all these in here. That way you have that path saved for later if you want to revisit it in the future. Welcome to Character Design Crash Course, a series of illustration classes meant for beginning cartoonists or intermediate character artists looking for a refresher. Take award-winning Skillshare Original Classes, Each class has short lessons, hands-on projects, Your membership supports Skillshare teachers. You may want to stick to the first design that you draw, but I really encourage you to explore as many different possibilities for one character as you can. Oh and it changed my name, so make sure that you have that named to wherever you want. Introduction: Hi, and welcome to Character Design Crash Course: Designing Animal Characters. Here I drew the fur on his chest, and this forces me to not be so precious with my drawing, in a way. Starting with finding inspiration and reference, then moving on to sketching and developing your concept and finally rendering it in Photoshop. That brings up the convert anchor point tool. Most great artists use it and you don't grow as an artist without it. Then they're a little bit browner everywhere else than it was before, a little lighter. This guy's fine. [laughs] But since I don't necessarily want to do that, I'm just adjusting it slightly to make it a little bit warmer. Then it will only affect that layer. I'm not saying that you should trace it exactly, render it fully, and then claim it as an original work, unless it's a photo you took yourself and your point is to draw realistically, of course, but that's another thing altogether. Stream or download to watch on the plane, the subway, or wherever you learn best. The main thing you have to think about, try not to stress so much about the spiral and all that stuff. It focuses on everything, humans, and all that good stuff. This will all inform how you decide to give expression to your character and the body language that your character will have. You just click and hold and then it brings up little drop-down menu and you click the gradient tool. || , Art by Jeff Maka Merghart* Blog/Website | (www.jeffmerghart.tumblr.com - www.jeffmerghart.blogspot.com) || CHARACTER DESIGN REFERENCES (www.facebook.com/CharacterDesignReferences & pinterest.com/characterdesigh) Love Character Design? These are all the designs that I ended up with. Join the Character Design Challenge (link www.facebook.com/groups/CharacterDesignChallenge) Share your unique vision of a theme every month, promote your art and make new friends in a community of over 20.000 artists! I can't help editing as I go and refining things as I go even when I'm in the initial development stage. The Golden ratio or the golden mean, is used not just in fine art but also in character design and architecture and all sorts of things. This is just how I work, so don't feel obligated to be as detailed as all of my designs are at this point. I don't remember thinking about it when I was drawing, but that's how it turned out and it makes far more interesting, appealing designs. I've linked to it under the Projects & Resources tab. It's important to study the styles of other artists and build up your versatility, and it's important to be influenced by more than one artist. What is its personality? I never ever skip this step because it can seriously just make or break your drawing. There's really no right or wrong way to go about doing it. It just takes some getting used to it really. I decided to put the extra texture on a separate layer so that it'll be easier to edit. You can change the settings, but I don't need to at this point so I'm just going to click Okay. Start by thinking about what the animals most distinguishable features are. I'm hitting the left and right bracket keys [ ] to change the brush size. First you'll want to gather reference for your animal and do some practice thumbnail sketches. This Border Collie drawing isn't mine, it's Stephen Silvers's. Now, I'm playing around with Hue/Saturation. Join the Character Design Challenge! Basically, you want to make your animal a bit more human-like to help your human audience to relate to it as a character. If you want to learn how to draw, you have to draw another artist's picture." There's a lot of breathing room for the negative space, which is just as important as the positive space. These should be simple, quick proportion and construction studies. You also want to avoid monotonous shapes and sameness when you can. Really try to push your designs and do more than one, because if I hadn't kept going, I wouldn't have gotten to my ultimate choice. That's just a really useful thing to know how to do in general. All you got to do is either go to your lines, or your BASE COLOR would probably work best, and select the outside with the Magic Wand, re-click the TEXTURE layer, and then delete. Speaking of style, I think that a lot of people worry too much about it. I can't wait to see what you create! At this point, I'm starting to add some details. I don't hate it or anything, but he's a little generic, I guess. Then that's when you start to push and exaggerate your designs. They are full of unique personality, symbolism, and come in almost limitless varieties! I really like to use the Radial Gradient tool. Then I'm going to use the Radial Gradient tool to color this. 5. I like to duplicate and save my layers periodically. You know exactly what she's doing, she's walking with purpose. This doesn't just happen in architecture and man made design. I did this until I came up with a design that I liked. I wanted to show you some of Stephen Silver's animal characters and also the artwork of some other artists that I really admire just to get you inspired and ready to design.

The lines are lighter by the ears and they're lighter down here by the white on the tail. Hold down Alt and click to break it. The ladder is basically everything being parallel and everything being equidistant and the exact same size. It always turns out somewhat pixelated and choppy edged, so I like to go over the rough spots and smooth them out, and pick a nice brush with a good edge. Just so you know I'm not going completely from memory here. I like this guy on the bottom right. The bowling ball effect mostly applies to the face and it happens when the eyes and nose, or say the eyes and the ears, are the same exact size and the same exact shape and it's just not very interesting to look at. One cool thing you can do is to select the Lasso tool by hitting L or clicking here and draw over where you want to add color. You'll have something like this and basically what you need to do is, change the title: Foreground to Transparent. There's so many things you can take inspiration from. So I'm just adding that element. The first is The Art of Animal Drawing. In this class, I'll take you through my process of designing and illustrating an animal character. I wanted to darken the spots, so I just duplicated the layer by by hitting Command J. I forgot to mention before that when I'm using the Radial Gradient tool, I usually have it at a lower opacity, anywhere between 10% to 30%. Then you can't really see it here, but there is a bit of green happening because this color is still set to green, so what you want to do with this one is also change it to the foreground color and then it will just smoothly go from whatever the foreground color is at 100 percent down to zero percent opacity. A lot of variation of shape. I'm using a texture brush here to add more spotting. They have it organized with what feels like endless categories. I love the shapes she used, and the color choices are really nice. The classes that I teach on Skillshare focus primarily on surface pattern design, watercolor techniques, and character See full profile. I thought this one was neat. I had a lot of fun drawing the spots in like this. Learning the construction and proportion of figures, humans and animals is super important before moving on to designing a character based on them. Here I'm adding a bit of warmth throughout because my colors were feeling a bit off.

It's a really subtle change, but it makes a difference. Another artist I wanted to talk about is Milt Kahl. allow yourself to fail before you succeed. I'm not going to bother showing you all of the steps of how I rendered this rhino, because a lot of it's similar to what I'm going to show you in the next video with the hyena character. It doesn't always have to be this exaggerated. Join the Character Design Challenge! Each day for four weeks, well have a different prompt to get you learning how to draw characters. Matt Kaufenberg, apologies if I am pronouncing that wrong. Below are the reviews written before that update. Wow, that's perfect. Ultimately, it's your choice whatever animal you decide to design from. Rendering In Photoshop: Now I've got my final design all cleaned up and ready to go. Sometimes I turn the sketch layer back on and turn down the opacity and then smooth it out. Mickey Mouse has got his medium-sized nose and his medium-sized eyes, but they are a different shape and then there's the big ears to contrast those. 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 took Silver's character design classes on Schoolism.com, which is a site that, unlike Skillshare, really just focuses on visual art. Here are some examples of avoiding the bowling ball. Animals can make fantastic characters to illustrate stories and ideas. Using Reference: First of all, using reference is not cheating. Faced With Fear: Conquering Your Fears of Illustrating Faces | Coloring Skin in Adobe Photoshop, Character Design Crash Course: Dynamic Design in Four Steps, Character Design Crash Course: Develop Expressive Characters Through Caricature, Character Design Crash Course: Designing Kids, Taught by industry leaders & working professionals, Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more. Next is Mary Blair. I just love how expressive they are. Yeah, I just love his stuff. Download our free Character Profile Template below to get started. Instead of focusing on what you might have hated in your drawings, focus on the fact that you've practiced and gained something from it. I would save myself a lot of time.

I'm smoothing out this edge by erasing it with a soft edged texture brush at a lower opacity, and then coloring it back in with the same texture brush. Inspiration is key. Hopefully, those things work for you and are as helpful as I find them. [laughs] Anyway. Another thing you really want to try to do is to avoid tangents. You have to learn to draw the figure of each animal, just like you have to learn to draw the human figure. Its your call how human your character is there is no wrong answer! 2020 Bardot Brush by Lisa Bardot // All Rights Reserved. For example: Next, take those features and exaggerate them! Practice Exercise: Another exercise I do is to, like I said before, choose an artist and try to draw an animal in that artist's style. They're so expressive and so human. The fox is really cool too though it's got this weird shape, this tiny waist and legs, and big head. I like these guys because they're odd. I'll probably end up changing it or adding to it, but that's what I have for now, and you want to make a new layer for the color. Then you can hold down Shift and draw again to add onto your Lasso selection. Here, I locked my base color layer and then I chose a soft edged brush. It's not entirely clear what she's doing. Construction, Action Analysis, Caricature by Ken Hultgren.

You can check your edges, but I've never really had an issue with them showing up, so that usually works for me every time. That's just another thing to consider when you're designing. Say you wanted to do a raccoon character, look in this board at all these amazing different ways that people have designed raccoons. What other features can you make more human-like? Now you have that in your gradients, which is exactly what you need. You can get some really wild colors with this. I'm endlessly inspired by animals and nature (whether living today or extinct), science fiction and fantasy, space and astrology, witchy things, and bees. Share your unique vision of a theme every month, promote your art, learn and make new friends in a community of over 12.000 artists :D Join our group today: www.facebook.com/groups/CharacterDesignChallenge || , "Pet" - Jeff Turley || CHARACTER DESIGN REFERENCES (www.facebook.com/CharacterDesignReferences & pinterest.com/characterdesigh) Do you love Character Design? The more you use it, the more you understand how to manipulate things. I'm using geometric shapes and I'm taking cues from how he textured his work, all the little lines he used, and all that good stuff. My favorite ones to use are Multiply, Overlay, and Soft Light, but they're all worth exploring and seeing what works best. He's got this one character in a bunch of different styles. These things are just little things you have to try to look out for and it will become easier to catch them the more you practice. You want to avoid the ladder avoid the bowling ball. Closing Thoughts: This class really only touches the surface of what you can learn when it comes to character design, which is why I called it a crash course. It really helps kick me out of artistic ruts that I'm in. Then you're going to want to click on this box and change the color, put the drop-down menu to foreground, which means it will always be whatever color is in the foreground of your color picker.

Another artist I love is David Colman, who focuses on animal characters. Creating expressions and emotions is all about manipulating the facial features, especially the eyes, brows, and mouth. I just really love his drawings. He just has a wealth of knowledge. Part of why I think people are so drawn to animals like this is because their faces are so interesting and cute and it's the variation of shape that makes them interesting. Here's another example with wolves. 9. I kind of wish I'd done it with the chest fur and the eyebrows just because it would make it a little bit easier to edit in the future if I could re-select that exact path. One thing you can do before you start that can be helpful, is to jot down the traits of the character you want to create. I think it's just adds a really nice quality if you're using lines.

Then you've got the Red Panda character on the bottom right with his small nose and big eyes and Dug with the opposite with his small eyes and big nose. 4. But I really like her animal characters as well. It's just one extra little touch that adds to it that I like to do. Character Design Crash Course: Designing Animal Characters. So if you just draw in with the lasso like this, you can go to your Paths and click this button down here, and it makes it into a new Path Selection. In October 2018, we updated our review system to improve the way we collect feedback. Also if you just want to delete some of these, I think you just click Option, yes. That's a really fun exercise and a good way to challenge yourself. But it does really help you to come up with creative ways of drawing different elements. You can do this in a number of ways. I've got some colors up here that I've already selected from these photographs so I'm just going to get my eyedropper, select my mid tone, reselect the Paint Bucket tool and fill in that selection.

I really hope you found this tutorial useful. We want it to be a solid gradient and then the smoothness at 100. Once you get to the final point, a little circle comes up and you just click, or click and drag to change the shape if you need to, and then you have your curve. Not very pushed or exaggerated in any way, so I'm going to go with one of the other more odd designs, if you will. He specialized in animals, and I think they're so cool and so unique. We'll just undo that. So the Linear Gradient tool can be found by clicking G on your keyboard or going down to where the Paint Bucket tool usually is. 6. These are really helpful if you're an animator. Just have a few examples. That's why I do it this way. I mean, it might. But there's a really simple solution to this. Thank you for sharing, Your email address will not be published. Something you might not think about. Making Art Everyday // Drawing Challenge! Because I really probably shouldn't do that. There's a little arrow that shows up to indicate this right next to the Pen tool. I'm just going to continue to make some shapes with the Pen tool, including the other foot, the horns, ears, nostril and eye. In the second, I have exaggerated certain characteristics and simplified others. This book doesn't just focus on animal characters. Her legs and arms are bunched together and it's just not as appealing to look at as the silhouette on the left, which is super clear. I've taken quite a few myself and I've never had any bad luck with them. For this guy here I was consciously trying to design with the golden mean in mind. For example, if we go back to these designs, from the top of Dug's head to his neck, it's about 1 and from his neck to his feet its about 1.6 and I think it's the same for the Red Panda character as well. Even if you exaggerate things, you have to exaggerate the right things. If we go back here, horses are a perfect example of this. Here I'm making this selection and then hitting Select and Inverse, so that I'm only able to add color to everything but the tail. Tangents are what happens when two or more shapes touch in a way that is visually bothersome. It really helps. If the bang was drawn further out from her face, it would be easier to read as being behind her face and not being stuck to her in some awkward way. Just the more and more you practice and the more you consider these things, the more it will become second nature to you. On that note, I wish you the best of luck, and I can't wait to see what animal characters you create! So yeah, just look at artists you admire and look for basic visual concepts that you can adapt to your own work. Then up here above the layers, there's this drop-down menu with blending modes. To design and illustrate an animal character of your choosing. You can take that further and use that in the spacing of all of the elements within the main body. I like how geometric they are and the textures he used. From the horse's back to their stomach and from their stomach to their hooves, it's about 1:1.6. I think it's really nice for more atmospheric pieces, and you can use it for cool lighting and such. That way I don't have to worry about coloring outside of the lines. He was one of the Disney greats. Select the Paint Bucket by clicking G, or it's right here on the toolbar beneath the Eraser button. Galleries, art references, tutorials and interviews from established and young promising artists in animation, movies, games, comics and illustration. Alongside doing freelance and art licensing work (I recently joined Riley Blake Designs as a fabric designer), I've spent much of my time cultivating my love of sharing what I know and encouraging others to nourish their creative side through teaching online art courses on Skillshare. It's just kind of boring. Then it has all of these options up here in the top left most of which I think are pretty useless. I linked to it under the Projects & Resources tab already. But, ultimately, I'm going to go with this guy on the top. You want to make sure it's at the top of your Layers panel, which mine is. I'll also talk about the fundamentals of character design, and the importance of using reference and learning from other artists. How I use it here is I go from outside the selection and draw a line up into this selection, and it makes this beautiful, smooth gradient. || , Art by Therese Larsson* Blog/Website | (www.sillybeastillustration.com) Online Store | (www.society6.com/sillybeast) || CHARACTER DESIGN REFERENCES (www.facebook.com/CharacterDesignReferences & pinterest.com/characterdesigh) Love Character Design? Now what you can do is go to your Layers panel, create a new layer and get the Paint Bucket tool, which is under the Eraser tool, or you can hit G on your keyboard. I'm using Brightness/Contrast to bump the contrast up a bit. I think that's cool. For example, this little squat animal that I drew at the top doesn't really look like a horse because its body is thicker and its legs are short so it wouldn't quite read as a horse. To subtract from your selection you hold down Alt (or Opt). There's a little button on the bottom here also, which is what I use most of the time. It has these amazing bears. Breakdown the size and space between each section and stick to those basic proportions. One quick way to fill in the base color that I like to do sometimes is to select your sketch layer, select the outside with the magic wand tool and select the Inverse by clicking Shift Command I, or going to Select and Inverse and make sure you go back to the new layer you just made. I also like the top left because it's an example of him using an actor to base a character on, which he said helps him figure out a character sometimes. This gives you the information you need to move on to more detailed developed designs. Everything else falls into these four categories. I'm just going to really quickly block in some colors. Anyway, moving on. And of course, all of the wonderful character design classes on Skillshare. I just didn't want to put them up on the screen so I could have plenty of room for drawing. I could just flip through his portfolio forever and stare in awe. Consider making the eyes larger, showing the whites of the eyes, adding eyebrows, and giving it a mouth with a wider range of motion. Since I want his foot to be behind the main body I'm just going to move it down.