what is character design?

Character design is one of our most popular classes! A character designer (or character artist) creates the entire concept, style, and artwork of a character from scratch. This often includes a deep look into the character’s personality to develop a visual idea of the character’s physical features.

This is the second course in our series of classes on character design for animation. In this course, we will have you do character studies and develop a variety of characters from different genres and places to sharpen your skills and push your imagination.

After completing each assignment your teacher will review and correct your characters giving you instruction on how to make your character more appealing to an international audience.

Everyone loves character design!

Characters are what people connect with. Audiences want to love your heroes! They want to hate the villains!  Appealing design and relatable emotions is what you want. Monsters, animals, and people are all part of character design!

After completing each assignment your teacher will review and correct it.  They will instruct you on how to make your drawings more appealing. Think of all the animated movies you love. The little mermaid! Beauty and the beast! Alladin!   Character design creatures are lovable and relatable! Not just feature films but think of all the cartoon stars you have come to love. Rodger Rabbit. Mighty Mouse. Mickey Mouse. Donald Duck. Bugs Bunny. Tom and Jerry. The list goes on and on. Each show must create the actors according to the budget and audience.

What do you need for this class?

You need to be drawing a lot! You should practice drawing and sketching wherever you are! Study film and comics. Study animation and look at lots of reference books

Character design uses a lot of references so be prepared to research!

You should also have taken some figure drawing classes.

Some of the topics covered in this course are:

• Research for the development of a character
• new character for an existing beloved story
• ethnically diverse characters with themes
• designing props
• robust designs and character model sheets