Character Design For animated Film | Rajen Ramkallawan | Skillshare
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Character Design For animated Film

teacher avatar Rajen Ramkallawan, Netflix Story Artist

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Character Design Lesson 1 Study the masters

      1:56

    • 2.

      Character design Lesson 2 Research

      3:42

    • 3.

      Character Design Lesson 3 The importance of caricature

      34:34

    • 4.

      Character Design Lesson 4 Character Features

      27:58

    • 5.

      Character Design Lesson 5 Rough Designs part 1

      26:34

    • 6.

      Character Design Lesson 6 Rough design part 2

      17:24

    • 7.

      Character Design Lesson 7 Character turn arounds and charactrer expressions

      46:48

    • 8.

      Character Design Lesson 8 Character Poses

      32:32

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About This Class

Character design for Animation is a great introductory course for anyone who wants to explore the world of character design. You will learn to develop character designs that establish the look, tone, and appeal of a character that fits within a story or world.   

Meet Your Teacher

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Rajen Ramkallawan

Netflix Story Artist

Teacher

Hello everyone, My Name is Rajendra Ramkallawan. I am a story artist currently working at Netflix Feature Animation, a teacher at BrainStorm Online, and a personal Mentor to aspiring story artists. I have been working in Hollywood for about 2 years but unlike many story artists in the industry, I did not go the traditional route through animation college.

Image: top left: Rajendra is less than one-year-old. Bottom left: 7 years old, Middle 26 years old. Far-right 30 years old

 

I grew up in the small twin island republic of Trinidad and Tobago which is in the Caribbean. There won't any animation schools in my country at the time and I could not afford to go to school in North America. Most of my education came from reading, learning online, and pra... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Character Design Lesson 1 Study the masters: Hi everyone. My name is urgent Jerome column, and I want to welcome you to Introduction to character design. And thank you all for taking the time to be part of this online class. During this video series, I'll be sharing with you the basic knowledge you would need to know for designing appealing character design for animation. We will explore the research needed before you start designing, developing characters which strong silhouettes, using a variety of contrasting shapes to design appealing characters and adding personality with gesture and much more. If you always wanted to create your own characters, this is the class for you. So let's get started. Before I teach any topic, I believe that it is essential for students to know the masters of that particular industry, and in our case, masters of character design. So since this is an introductory class, there won't be any major lessons in this video. Instead, I will be giving you a list of character design artists that I want you to do a little research on. Google them and look at their work. Follow them on all their social media platforms. The reason why studying the work of the masters is essential is that you will see the standard at which you need to be at. I'm not seeing to compare yourself to these artists and judge yourself harshly. That is not healthy. No. I'm telling you this because you need to understand the standard of work you need to produce to be noticed by other professionals and work in the character design industry if that's what you want to do. So let's get right into your assignment. Good luck guys, and see you in the next class. 2. Character design Lesson 2 Research: Now before you even start drawing any designs for your characters, you need to do as much research and reference gathering as possible of your chosen character. You'd find that many inexperience artists would just start drawing characters without doing any research, only using their memory as a resource. This is very limiting because when we referenced from our memory, we tend to go to things we saw on TV shows, movies, cartoons, comics, et cetera, which would often create designs that look sloppy and unoriginal. You should always gather as much research as you can given the amount of time, annual budget. Let's say you had to design a tiger character. If you can go to the zoo to absorb tigers, you definitely should. If not, watch as many YouTube videos about tigers and gather as many tigers, reference images as you can. You'll discover much more things about tigers that you never knew before. And you may see something unique from your observations that can add a special touch to your designs. Now for this video series, I want to have you all choose Character topics and you are going to begin and end this class developing your character design as you move through this course. So what I would like you guys to do is to go to a website called Character Design reference. Character design reference is a website that holds monthly character design challenges. And what I like about the challenges is that they always have interesting topics to choose from. Once you are on the website, go to all themes and choose one of the themes to work with throughout this course. If you can decide, I want to work with the same theme that I'm going to work with. You can do that as well. At the end of this course, you are going to design three characters based on your theme. One male, one female, and one child, male or female. So if your theme is Gladiator, you will design one meal gladiator, one female gladiator, and one child Gladiator. The theme I'm going to work throughout this course. We'll be Roller Derby. And as an example, I will show you how I go about doing research on this topic. So let's jump into that. So basically when I started doing research, I look at videos of my subject matter on YouTube. Now the reason why I watch video is because video allows me to see how these people move, their personalities and their dashes. Now, since my topic is roller derby, I decided to watch one of the roller derby matches to see how the game is played and to see if it would influence my ideas. It is a very rough sport, so I know my character is going to be tough. I also watch a little short documentary on one of the players to see her personality and her team interactions. Once I watching our videos, than I start searching for some reference images. Now what I look for in good reference images are closer look at the costume, props and faeces. I then gather up all my reference into a specific folder and keep them in my desktop. This way I can refer back and forth to the images without having to go on the Internet repeatedly. I usually repeat this process for all the characters I'm about to design. So what I want you guys to do for your assignment, I want you to do what I did, but for your theme and gathers much reference as possible. In the next class we will talk about the basic ideas to start building your characters. So good luck guys and see you in the next class. 3. Character Design Lesson 3 The importance of caricature: Designing a character from scratch can be intimidating. And you might be wondering, where do I start this lesson? I will talk to you guys about the importance of caricature and your character design method. For those of you who don't know what caricature is, is basically the exaggeration of certain features of a subject. I use caricature all the time in my character designs. And I believe if you understand how to use caricature, it will help your designs improve. So let me do some demonstrations of caricature and I will talk you through it and how I go about doing it. Okay, So as I said before, caricature is basically the exaggeration of features. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to show this guy here, and I'm just going to draw them in a caricature style. And I'm going to do it in different ways. And I'm going to show you how I go about doing it in different styles and designs. So my first one is not gonna be as dramatic, but it's going to help you understand what I mean, right? So this guy has a rectangular face, right? And you'll see how much different my second, third versions are gonna be because I'm not going to push this one-to-two crazy. This one is more, a bit more realistic, but not that realistic. Right? So we have a little cartoon version of this guy here. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to shrink this down smaller so that I can do the second version. Right? Now what I want to show you guys is that you can design faeces and designing your characters based on simple shapes. So here we have a circle, a triangle, and a square node. These are the most basic shapes he could get down to. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to do a caricatured version of this guy, but paste them more on the circles, squares and triangles are gonna do three more character cockroaches. And the first one, I'm going to make it more sick obese. No. This is a good way. If you're trying to come up with different options for your design, It's a good way, a good place to start off. Because then you could get a variety of different looks for the character that you're designing. So a lot of manipulation here. So in this version, his head is much more circular. I'm going to try and keep everything in that kind of circular basis here. Let me to move them down to get some more space. So now we have a more circular fees with version of this guy. Neat on this side. Alright. No, he almost looks like it's pretty much a different place. And now you can see that that's the way your variety in your ships coming in. So the next one I'm going to do now is the triangle version. So I am going to make his face a bit more triangle, but I'm going to use this triangle not on the head. So there's handle the more kind of focus coming down this way. So you have much more of a triangular shape there. All right. It's caricatures. I'm going to exaggerate features of his fears as pruning mustachioed a bit because he's a little older. And here we have a triangular Boucher. His face is more based on a triangle and this one. Alright, so you could see redrawing the same guy, same phase, everything that nice change. But we get in different versions of the same guy with caricatured versions of him using different shapes to help us develop it. The last one is gonna be a square. I think I get fit a square lesion and here, square face. Very, very basic. I'm going to make his most batch really, really dominant in this one. So I exaggerate and not most dash because it is a very important characteristic that he has. Right? So when you see a characteristic in someone's fees, when a character you want to emphasize it, you should definitely make it bigger. There though. His lip is kind of overlapping, It's chin. So I want to keep it as square the one to be rectangles. I'm going to keep his eyes like down here. So there we have it, the version based on two squared. So I'm going to actually do another example for you guys to show you again, let someone else. So there are different ways to approach doing caricatures. And I'm going to show you a different way than the previous example. So in this one, I want you to pay close attention to these spaces in-between the features of the face, the spaces between the eye and the nose, nose and the mouth and the chin right? Now, if you look at these spaces here, you would notice that at different sizes right? Now, what I want you guys to notice is how I would push these spaces in-between two features, depending on how I see the features of the face. So let's, if I observe this girl's face and I see features that stand out to me a lot. I would make those features bigger. And if the features that I see maybe later on are the features I would make smaller. So for her the first thing I see is her eyes and her hair. So those are the two most prominent features I want to exaggerate. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to draw the here and make it quite exaggerated. Alright. I'm gonna make it quite big. Quite over the top. Alright, and I want to make the eyes bigger as well because they really stand out to me in the original photo. I'm going to make them bigger. Right? Nobody knows that something that didn't really catch my attention. So I'm not going to exaggerate or make that big. And the malt. This could go either way, but I'm going to go with maybe small foods. And then maybe in my next version, I will do one way, maybe a larger mole. Now she has a really short chin, so I'm going to try and exaggerate that and pull it up even more. So you can see how for having a really, really short chin. She has earrings. I could make it bigger for some more contrast. And then she has some hair sticking out on the side here. I think I'm going to make the hair a bit bigger because I really wanted to stand out. Alright. So we have caricatured version of a here. Now this one isn't that pushed. So I'm gonna do another version, pushing it, pushing new features even more. But before I do that, I want you guys to take notice of the spaces in-between the features. Right? And how I made them a little more exaggerated than the previous one. So if we look at this one compared to this one, these pieces have a lot more contrast in between them, right? I'm going to make even more exaggerated version of right now. So those spaces would become even more. Contrast it. So I'm still going to, let's see. I'm actually going to make the hair a bit more flat in this solution. Because with caricature there's no real, there's no real standard. Ted, you can, if, if, let's say five different artists, Judy samples and each one would look totally different because they would have exaggerated different features of that subjects. So in this one, I am going to exist, well, maybe he has smaller, but I'm going to make the forehead bigger. Alright, Experiment. And, and this, this is kind of, you know, get transferred to your character design method because, you know, you've been trying to find the right design and you have to do a lot of experimenting, a lot of trying to find the design. So Charaka Jello was you to practice doing different versions? Right? And each one doesn't have to be perfect. No, it's about exploring. So I'm going to make the nose a bit long. And actually I think I made her eyes to swallow. Actually, I'm going to make the eyes I'm going to keep her eyes big. Keep them. Then I'm gonna make it keeping it small. But I'm going to actually make the lips bigger. She's quite serious. And this photo, so I'm going to keep that shin pretty small. It looks pretty wacky. It's actually then omega Aaron is a lot bigger than I. Need some more contrast in between that. Here. Right now I still think I could push this even more crazier. So I'm going to do one more and I'm going to go really, really crazy. But I want to make her fees longer. Let me just make this a little smaller. So I'm gonna make this last version. I'm going to try here a bit more elongated. So I'm going to push it quiet. I'm going to have the year, like really, really off the top exaggerated. Anything about caricatures. You could go whole. Exaggerated. You want. I've seen artists go really, really crazy lake. So exaggerated. And it's really amazing advocate go that far. I've never really gone as far as I've seen other artists pushed their caricatures. So even if I try, I don't think it looks good. But you giggle as how far you want to push it. Really exaggerated here. I'm going to maybe lips really, really small. So you have like a really big contrast. And I'm going to keep the eyes big, really big, really big earrings. We go. So here we have three different versions of caricature using this reference photo. And it's basically treat different character designs. So that's why I thought caricature would be an essential part for you guys to know before you start designing your characters. And this just applies to the face, right? You can also do this with the body, which will, which will. I will show you next, right? But remember when you're doing a caricatures and you're not sure what she spaces in between the features and see how you can mix and match these pieces in-between the features to make them enough contrast because I can't. Stress, creates a better appeal in your drawings. And it makes it more designed and appealing and less boring compared to drink something realistic. So let's move on to designing or showing you how caricatures can be applied to the whole body. So here we have two American football players. They look like they're in high school. And I'm going to show you how. When you use in our reference. And you look in at, you looking at this object. It doesn't matter who you are or your perception. When you look at someone Susan, things stand out to you. Whether it's looking at a face or the entire body. And based on the things we spoke about with the face, it's basically the same thing transferred over to the entire body. So you could design someone with a more triangular body. I'm also killer body or square body. And then you could, I'm using the previous rule, kid, apply the various species and between the features, look at those spaces and maybe trying to exaggerate those spaces in-between it already certain body parts. So I'm going to show you, because a demonstration would be way better. So I'm going to focus on this guy first here. And when I looked at him, I see like he has because of his hair, he seems like a kind of upside down triangle, triangular face. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go really. Cartoony, really basic. So there we have this shape. I'm going to go with his head. And then you have his body. Know this area here is where his pods protective possible. So B and you get in this kinda bulge here with the excess fabric. So I'm going to actually make this a little bigger than it is near reference. And you'll notice that I'm focusing on the shape of his body first before I even go into any detail. Now, his body gets a little more slimmer down here. So I'm going to exaggerate that. Again, Maslow my hair. He has like a big fish dies and then his feet kind of narrows down here. So I'm going to do is I'm going to make the task a little bit bigger. Then I'm going to make the feet much more narrower down here. Let me create more room. Shrink. This will quit keeping the feet narrow. And I'm going to create some contrast and make strap foods more bigger. So you see I'm creating contrasts with the various sizes of the features and his body parts, right? So because his feet are skinny down here, what I'm going to do for his arms is I'm going to make them a little bit bigger. Join his fingers. Dana's hand signal. Pretty. We just keep an eye on or off. Still. We can all do design. It doesn't have to be super clean, super sharp. You know, once you, once you have your design down, then you could worry about doing cleanup. Know that we have this basic shape, right? When we look at it, you could see all the different shapes. Alright, more triangular body, very thin legs. And there's a lot of contrast between the top of the body and the lower part of the body. So I'm using the contrast degree of appeal, right? So if I would teach us, you know, in features here. All right. Let me fix that. Just putting some placeholders for the cease because I'm just wanting to show you how you can apply the same principles of cappuccino fears. You can apply it to the body. Actually because he took off, his body is big. I'm going to make his head a bit smaller because the contrast is a bit off when I was looking at it. So this looks a bit better. Alright, because I had bigger against big and I wanted maybe small, big and then small again, right? And terms of the ships of his body. So then you can go back in design phase. All right, so we won't talk about detail too much in this lesson. But this is a stage. Of design and the shape of the body. It should usually come before you even start focusing on the smaller details of the body and what you're going to put into the costume and color and all of that stuff. Like you need to have your ship designed on first. Once you find something appealing that works for your character, then you can move on to that. So let me try and do another full body, one fee to see, right? We're going to apply the same thing. For this one. I'll try and do multiple versions of the same character. So you can see that in not restricted just to that one version. All right. She has a big O. We're going to exaggerate that. And again, just like the football, I'm gonna draw a bigger thighs and make the feet coming down very narrow. So you get a contrast again in different parts of the body. Contrast between this area, this area, you know, you have large and then you off small. Right? And then you have small. All right? So I'm going to make here omega here. Because it's something that I think is an important part of the schools character. So I'm going to exaggerate it here and be bold, big. All right, for the, I'm going to make the arms tiny to go with the timeliness of the upper body. Alright. Then again, just please hold the face now, these, these are just rough, sorry. No. When we get into doing multiple versions or trying to find the right character. Alright, you'll have to do multiple versions and keeping it rough. I'm just focusing on the ship, the overall shape of the design. Alright, we won't, won't focus too much on details for now. Let me do another version of her. So you could see Give her a longer face, a longer neck, the sign in or just playing with the shapes, playing with the contrast. Maybe in this version, I will give her a longer alone that OSU and are really, really cropped short. Now you see how I approach making my decisions when I decided to make her torso longer? I already knew maybe I will be making her shorts even shorter than previously. So I'm probably going to keep the size of the thighs Lodge at the top, but I'm going to make a tall and then before long the legs. And they say I'm not being restricted by my reference. I'm just using the reference as a guide. And then I'm using my design principles to maybe choices. I'm allowing myself to caricature without this, without restriction. Alright? If I wanted to go really crazy with the hair, I could go like this. Alright, so we get a totally different version of her. So it's basically a totally different character, totally different design. Now you see how you get up like caricature to the entire body now, not only limited to doing caricature for the fees, right? So I hope this was helpful and I hope you will use caricature any designs moving forward. And now we're going to talk about the assignment I want you to do to practice, to help you with the principles of applying caricature a tear, friends, and not copy in your reference. So let's move on to that now. 4. Character Design Lesson 4 Character Features: Welcome back everyone. In this lesson we're going to talk about designing the features of your characters. No matter where you are in the wool. If you observe people in public, you will see that everyone has unique features of the face and body that contribute to their character. Some people may have similar features but not identical. And you would find that some artists fall into the trap of drawing characters that have the same fears, same body type. And the only thing that they used to distinguish them is they're all fit or hairstyle. I don't want you guys to fall into this trap. That's why we're going to explore how you can design a variety of character features. We will be focusing on the hands, feet, and face, but you will be able to use the methods we learned here on any part of the character's body. So let's get started. So the first thing we're going to talk about is hand. Now hands are really special feature of a character. And the way you draw them could add real dimension and real personality to your particular character. Large hands could mean something. Small hands could mean something depending on who the character is, right? So I want to show you how I go about designing different hand. Then we can move on to other features right? Now, before I actually do the designing or Behance, I want to show you how I draw hands because I know hands can be very difficult for a lot of people to draw. And this is my quick little go-to when I joined hands or join hands and I'm very difficult position. So basically the hand is a cuboid. Like this. You can use this basic shape to draw the surface area of the hand, right? So let's say if I was drawing this and over here, I will try and break it up into this basic shape first to make it simpler. And then I would go about adding in the fingers, right? Which are basically little cylinders attached to the cuboid. So and it makes it easy for me to break. Don't know, this is just like a rough, very rough version of the hand that I put down first. And then when I'm doing cleanup, then I would go in into adjusting to how I want the design of the hand to be. But this allows me to put down a very rough please hold up for the position of the hand and then I get out in the shapes. And for my particular joint that I tried to keep the hands as simple as possible. I know a lot of people tend to do, tend to draw the hands in really detailed, complicated style. And I don't think it's necessary in terms of designing your characters. What you want to do is design your hands for your character and not design it based on your reference or based on too much realism. You want to design the hands, the character. So let me move on to another example. So here we have a wood shop guy and he is, you know, Calvin, some word here with a tool. I would shave I think. And what I wanna do is I want to show you how I could draw these hands in so many different ways. So what I would do is the first one, I'm going to draw it. I'm going to try and draw it a bit similar to the reference photo. And I'm not going to draw it to caricatured from the reference photo. I'm going to keep it kind of it on point to that, to the hand in the pit here. So I can show you how it differs from the other hands I design. Right? Yeah. Alright. A bit rough but it gets the basic idea. Don't know if I wanted to draw the hand of, let's see, a young girl, a young woman. Right now they would have a bit softer and let's say the girl wasn't a wood shop person. She is more of less entire job that doesn't involve the hands out much. Her hands wouldn't be as strong and as as tough as this gentleman's hand. So what you would do is you would draw the hand silica bit more softer, NO. To have less jaggedness, to be a bit more thinner. Softer. Alright, let's see future in the next time. You keep it small, you keep it soft. Because you know, it's a female characters time. And you would just use the reference as a guide. Now, if, if the character was even bigger and stronger guy than this person who is actually the wood carver here. And we wanted to exaggerate it and make it more scary, scary looking person. Let's say we needed to know about the character just by watching his hands. Like, how would I go about designing that? Make his mic, his fingers like really, really sick and you know, rugged and scary looking. Right? I would go about that. See. And even when you're drawing the hands, you can think about cartilage or like how can I caricature this hand to make it look big and scary, you know, could make thumb really huge. I began scary. I'm thinking this guy is very, very huge. Just by watching his hand is think well his fingers. We can tell that, well, these guys are really, really big and scary compared to the previous two characters. I assume you're drawing the next one as well. Android, big thick of fingers. We draw any hands doing the same thing so you can see the difference with a character. And you know, I just add some here on the hands the show. Maybe this guy's really from the hard work in lumberjack guy in there. Hey everybody. Alright, let's do the front hand. Yeah, let's do this side. It's the same principle. Let's say we will draw in a scary monster right? From the depths of who knows where, right? Fit, draw it. Now the fingernails and this monster. Be something out of this world. So we'll draw long, scary, evil looking fingernails. All right. Already looking like something attached to some kind of monster or some kind of demon. It all depends on how far you want to go or how timid you wanna go. Let's say it was a baby, right? The drain babies or the limbs are babies. You have to use more rounded, more stubby shapes For a child compared to an adult? Yeah. More stubby sheets. So just by watching these hands, you can tell what kind of character these hands are attached to just by watching the hand. So I'm overlooking the hands could be a very big mistake in it. I didn't even know that personality to your characters. And your hand, your design of the characters, you know, the style in which you draw your hands. You could draw it in like, you know, something, something very different, something very stylistic. You know, maybe enjoyed, really, really busy. And you have a, you'd have a different kind of character with this one. This one isn't close to life as the other two, but it's a Han, you recognize a time. And you could tell maybe this is attached to somebody who is skinny. And if the character is way different from that of a demon or baby. But we could tell that, Hey, these are three different characters and these hands are not attached to the same person. We can definitely identify that they are totally different characters. So you could, you could explore and find a new design. Like you might not even know the direction you want to go in. And that's why exploration is so important in finding the right design for your characters and your overall design of your character would influence certain aspects of. The features of a character, right? So if you know your character is going to be skinny, maybe a character is going to have long, long, skinny hands. And if a character is strong, maybe he's a bodybuilder. Your character is going to have bigger more whoop times, you know, because he's in the gym working out. His fingers are going to be much stronger than the character who is skinny right? Now this applies to all the features of the face. And we're going to move on to defeat, and we're going to move on to the face now. Now the same principle applies to defeat right? Now, ephedrine, defeat of this woman. We're going to draw it closer to the reference for this one. All right. Just by watching the reference, we could probably guess that this woman is like maybe in her 20s, early twenties, mid-twenties. Just by watching her feet. She's probably maybe a 100 in 15 bones or something along those lines. Just by the feed right. Now, I want to show you, once I finished this one, I'll show you, I'll be drawing the same defeat with a bit of different character in it. Alright, so now that we've finished this one, now let's say we were drawing the feet of a more heavy, sad woman. I, we wanted to create a contrast in the feed rate. So let's say her feet heavier on top. And then we could create contrast by making her feet really, really small. So you get like a nice contrasts coming up here. Using this same photo as a reference. Right? Draw the next leg. And you see how he could caricature any part of the body. It doesn't just have to be the face. Alright? So we have two. And again, we have a variety in, in-between these two characters. We not draw in to see him legs and the same feed for every character we have, you know, we have to explore the variety. Let's do another example which would defeat, alright, let's go back to having maybe a real rugged lumberjack guy. Feet and all his feet would be weird, different than this woman. This, his feet maybe look really, really unattractive feet like really hairy, really muscular. Know his tools and see me at all like Vietnam and stuff like that. I'm creating character in a sec, really, really ugly feet. And let's say the, draw some contrasts between the characters. Let's draw, let's say we could draw the feet of maybe a young boy or girl. Alright, obviously the size will be different. And again, when you draw in younger characters, you want to keep the shapes more rounded and less sharp. Now, when you're drawing all the people, these shapes tend to be more more sharp and more. The edges seem more triangular and stuff. But for younger characters, you tried to keep it a bit more smooth and curved. Rounded shapes, more stubby. I get younger characters when you draw it like that. Yeah. So same thing applies to defeat. Now let's move on to the face. And the face has a lot of features, so we can have a lot of talk about there. So here we have a variety of different people, different reference photos we're going to use, right? And when we look at these people, all of these people are different because they have different features, right? So why would you draw your characters half in similar features? If in real life everyone has different features. And when we're drawing characters, we need to exaggerate these differences to add more character to our characters. So let's start with the nose. If you look at the nodes of each character here, everyone is different. Now, if I were to use these reference pitches as inspiration to create my own characters, I would just use them as inspiration. I would not copy them. I would look at the shape of the nose and try and design a news for my character based on it but not copying it. So the first nodes by the old man, let's see if we were to draw it more accurate to the folder, right? We do a quick sketch of that, Louis. Alright. We have one nose. Now, if I were to draw, Who knows, it would be a little more rounded, a bit more smooth compared to the old man's nose. Alright, and we get orally tell that these nodes is belong to different people, different stages in life, right? If we look at, maybe this go over here for noise. If you are drawing her nose. No, it's a bit more wider. Right? And then same thing with this guy over here, is known as the front. Pointed downwards. Know, you're already getting a lot of variety in the shapes of you knows, just by looking at the reference, I'm copying the reference. But what if we apply a caricature to these noses? So let's go back to the first guy and let's try and car could share that news to something, you know, more cartoony. What if we push the nose wider? It will. Oh, that's it. That's different. Let's try and go more like this. And there we have you do another shape. We could explore shapes like this. For a really, really long time. We can get different varieties. All right, let's do one more. Let's see if we get some more. Alright. So we have different nodes is there of inspired by the photo of the older gentleman there. And it's the same thing we could do with designing variety. Let's go again with this girl here. She has a much more smoother nodes, right? So if we were to exaggerate, that will get probably just leave out the bridge of the nose. I'm probably just add the bottom piece. Or if we wanted to, we could make it really, really smooth and go like that. Or, you know, I'm looking at this nodes and i'm, I'm designing based on this nose and creating different looks, right? So you can have a bunch of different looks. And designing variety. You could even just maybe just do this if we wanted to go really simple. And Israel that bridge day. All right, You see I'm already designing variety. So there's no real excuse not to, to create differences. You know, everything is there to be inspired by in the references. And that's why I want you to be more creative with design and the features. We all had to create things that never existed before, to create characters that never existed before, right? We want to put in our pool snow creativity. We don't just want to copy from the full dose and copy from real life. We want to be inspired by real life, right? And it's the same thing with the hair and the eyes and the shape of the head, right? So let's say if we were doing focusing on the eyes, now, I will go back to the older gentleman there. His eyes are more squinted in, right? So we could draw it like this. And maybe you, maybe you wanted to design a character whose eyes are really, really close and I looked like his eyes closed all the time. Right. As compared to, let's say the girls. I, and she's Asian. Like how could we design eyes to show that this girl is Asian in algebra and, you know, we probably have to do, we could get a variety of designs. Could come up with a lot, a lot of designs. It's just take some time and patience to lock down your design. And you know, you might be starting off, you might be impatient. You just want to go with the first thing. That you'd draw it first thing is never really the best thing. And it's, it's, it's about exploring and notice about taking risks because at this stage you can take risks with your designs. And with this one, this design, I'm just going to push the exaggeration a bit more creative with the eyes. You know, and if we wanted it to go like really, really cliche, I make the eyes like really, really chunky, kinda stereotype. And I'll get go with that. None if, if we want it to be even really, really simple dependent on this style. Here though you can go earlier, it was simply doesn't matter. This is designed and no, it's not about drawing realistic is about design. If you want to go simple, or if you wanted to go, depending on the style of this show, you wanted to go maybe a little more detail. I'm putting certain things there in the eye to make it look more realistic. I wanted to put details in the eye and the lady, light shines in the eye. I know we already get an a variety of ICA, right? So and again, it's, it's like a repetitive process. You experiment. You don't just locked down. The first thing you draw and just say, Hey, that's going to work because you never know what design you're leaving on the table. Something that could be way, way more interesting, right? Same thing with the right, same thing with remote. Let's grab this and go with them. All right. Let's use the lips. The school, right? That's right. More realistic to the photo first. Alright. As it looks there right now, we could go more exaggerated. Simplify it some more. We get cool. We can modify it a bit, make it top lip. The dominant animal experiments so that we can make, what if we make the top lip small and the bottom lip huge? We get an a different look there too. So what if the towel version where we focus on this V-shape and the top lip, we can add that in, make it a little more realistic. Or if we wanted it to be super, super simple, we can just do a line that can be independent on his style. It might not work for this character, but it's still a different version of it. Let's see. We were dry and lips for her. Well, based on this reference and watched his ship, we could, we could play around with this ship. Go more round. Experiment is, there's always so much variety in the shapes you can apply. Really exaggerated dv. Alright. So the point I'm trying to get across here is that I want you guys to come out of your comfort zone and start designing. Start thinking about what, what features can I add to this character to emphasize their character? And he could always think about the character and tried to design for them, pick character, very gentle person and you can add more cuz to the character. The characters is our rough, rugged person. He can vary square shapes to their fears. Make them really, really rugged on square. Use, use your reference as a resource and not just copy it. So I hope you guys understand this concept of China, the features, and I hope you like practice it. So your assignment is going to be to draw a variety of features and explore as many varieties as possible, as many options as possible. Just, just, just have fun. It doesn't have to be you trying to block known specific nodes for our character. What I want you guys to do is to just drove variety, draw as many variations as possible. Um, you can use as many references as possible and see how much, see how much versions of eyes you could draw. Cmos, versions of lips and hands and feet. You can draw. So good luck guys and see you in the next class. 5. Character Design Lesson 5 Rough Designs part 1: So here I got it up. All my references that I downloaded from the Internet. I picked out my favorite ones. One, that one said, I think that I will pull certain elements from things that I think are appealing. And I put them together in one image in Photoshop so I can refer to them. And just watch the image. Just look around the image and watch all the different players in the image and get inspired for my design, right? So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna walk you through how I go about coming up with my first set of ideas and then deciding on, on my selection and moving forward which ones I liked the most. So what I do is I look at my references. I think about what I want my character to be, right? And it's a roller derby, so the character is going to be tough, as I said. And out of the three characters that we're going to design, I'm going to start off with a female and then probably do the meal and then the child. It doesn't matter which one you start with. I'm just starting with that one because I guess I'm just feeling to start with that one. It's Nauru particular reason. Yeah. What I do is I'm looking at it. I take any images for awhile. I look, I look at some of the body types and the shapes. And, um, I thought process and what I could do in my mind. And then I would just jump into it. So the first, the first idea that I have in my head is like a really tough woman, right? So I wanted to have like a big very intimidating gotten a ship. So I'm going to start off with very big upper body. Work my way down. Now, I'm not going to spend too much time on this idea is what I wanna do is that I want to get some body shapes down really fast, eight and then move on from there, develop more and more and more. The first thing I do is I start developing some, some body shapes, just getting some ideas about doing it really fast. Let's try something a little more around the same level of toughness, but just a little more lean. I tried to keep the shapes, contrast it. So if you notice, if I have the top of the body, huge, I tend to contrast that against like smaller or thinner legs. Because there's a, there's an appeal and contrasts. So I tend to try to keep things really contrasted. I don't try to keep all like everything so close to real life and have everything as proportion as real life. And, um, these body types, even on designing the female, you can actually pretty shoes, pretty much use these body types for almost any male or female character. I'm just putting down some stuff. Let me take a look back at my reference and see what's going on there. Now when I look at my reference, I see that there are few goals that they looked off, but they're not that huge. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to also design some girls with a smaller top area and maybe longer or bigger legs. And just trying to get an overall idea of the body of the character. So since the legs are huge in this one, I'm going to keep the arms thin. So you could see these are just four solutions. And we already have a bit of relate different types of characters here. So let's try and maybe take a look at the reference again. Now that's the good thing about having a near reference there, is that once you, once you run out of ideas, you can always just go back to the reference and read, refresh your mind with some ideas and then just come back again. I don't like call that leg position. No. This one has more of a uniform leg structure. Same size. Very true. I'm not sure I like it do, but that's okay because it's just this sketch and not spend too much time on it. Maybe I could probably design one with a big head because of the helmet. And I'm going to be really big experiment here. I don't think it'll, will code for this one, but still trying it. Let me make some more room sharing this. One thing I should also mention though, is that when you're designing your characters and you do it in like a quick body types, you should probably, which I didn't do, you should probably try and small. That way. You don't spend too much time on detail because I think sometimes the best of us, we get caught up in detail. So if it's small, it tend not to worry too much about detail. Because then you can't really fit it into a small thumbnail sketch. This one's a bit to traditional. It's not to exaggerate or anything. More. Focus on legs, smaller torso, and intimidate them look kinda like that polytope might exploit a little later. No, the pauses don't have to be that amazing just yet. Um, pause and we'll talk about in a later lesson because pulls in and gesture is important part of designing the look of your character. Because some characters would pose a certain way. Those warrants. So it will get different feelings from different characters based on their posture. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to do a bunch of these body designs. And then I'm going to come back and show you guys, because this might take really, really long and it may be a bit boring. But you've seen how I started and then we'll move ahead to how I'm going to select which bodies dying is I want to develop and such and such and such. So let's skip ahead to that. So I did a few more options for the design and I actually came up with to that I think were really appealing to me. And I'm going to develop these two now based on his sketch. So you could see how I take it from this stage onto the next stage and develop a new character. These are the two rough sketch designs I decided to go with. I really like the first tough, vague, more heavy, said good. And this small girl, I like how they look. Standing next to each other. And I'm going to use a new one on the left as the woman and the one on the right as the child. And I'm gonna develop these and I'm going to show you guys how I developed this now. So I'm going to start with the woman, right? And usually, once I have this rough sketch to work with, I start tweaking it, creating different versions, trying things out. Because I've actually narrowed down the concept right now, there's so much possibility is you could do in character design. So this is like for me, this is the first age of narrowing down a whole bunch of ideas into something more specific to where the direction I want to go. So once I have this design, I usually, you know, drop the opacity. And what I want to do too as well as have my reference open. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to swap in between the reference and my design. And I'm gonna see elements in the reference and sat adenine more detail, a little more detail and fleshing out the character. So let's see what we could find here. We could look at the details of the helmet, of the uniforms, the protective pads. Add that little more detail there onto the character. So I'm going to start with the helmet. And I'm not going to like try and B, not going to try and be too clean. Right now in my sketch, I spontaneously kinda drew her what her helmet cover in her eyes. And I kinda liked that idea. So I'm gonna go with it now for the first version. But I might try drawing her with eyes. And the other versions. Draw some pony tails. And you'll see I'll be like clicking off and going back and checking the reference and, you know, coming back. You know, what I can add in. Now the reason why I chose this one as well is because I really liked the shape of the current. You know, it was really appealing to me like, I don't know. I think I was able to make something that has not too much contrast, but a bit of contrast and body type. And I thought that was really appealing to me. And I could rework this and add some stuff and see how it comes along. And I'll flush it out a bit. I really liked all I made he shorts, like really, really thin down here. A nice contrast between the size of the shirt and shorts. All right. Let me just check the knee pads. Knee pads are generally big, so I'm going to try and see if I can get that. Alright, right now, We're moving on top port and characteristic, which is the actual rule of blades. And then just design I had her feet pretty small. I'm going to try and keep it pretty small. Remember the door for you to be checking on era friends and using it. Eventually just for reference. During the human body. We'll worry about thinking not doesn't make it disappear if it needs to reference to draw the human body. Like you're designing a character. We not, we not here to prove that we could draw everything from our minds and we're so great and we don't need reference. Inexperienced people would judge you on how well you could draw from your mind. And that's the ultimate thing. Yeah, But that's that's something to worry about that Let me see. No, she has tiny feet. I'm thinking of making the leads on your blade tiny as well. So you have something coming along. Alright, now we can move up through the arms. And now I'm looking at the reference. I get. I can tell that they're different. Various bonds and protection control it multiple is actually bad. Keep checking back and make sure I draw the equipments accurate and things don't look wonky. Totally made up as though somebody who's drawing it out of their head and keep checking. Alright, so since the top of the hand arm actually is huge, I'm going to make them fingers to just finish off fingers. Right? So you have a cleaned up version there. And I'm going to do is just add some simple detail to the uniform. Looking at the reference to see what I could add. Nothing too complicated in terms of What's on the uniforms. They usually seem to just have a logo. And let's find some stripes and that's pretty much it. I'm not going to go beyond what I see. They're not gonna put any fancy logo, anything. Alright, this is my first cleaned up version. Let me write that so you could see it better. So my first cleaned up version, right? Let's see, we have a character coming along here. Right? Now. I'm not going to do too much in this one video. So I'm going to wrap up this video here. But what I want is that I want you guys to catch up to me at this stage with your characters. And then we'll move on from there. So I'm going to tell you guys what to do the assignment and then you just guys work on that. And then we get moved forward on actually refining the character's face and any other detail that we need to do before we move on into the next step. So let's do that now. 6. Character Design Lesson 6 Rough design part 2: Alright guys, know that we have our foods rough design. I want to start doing some more designs just for the head alone. So this was the head on this character is my first, initial sketch, a rough design for this particular design. But I want to explore more of the head and see how I could tweak it, what different options I could put on it. Try different hairstyles, tried different versions of the helmet, mounted nodes, etc. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use the reference, same reference as before. I'm just going to explore different alternatives to the hair. I might find something I like any new ones. I'm maybe not, and maybe I just might stick with the old one, but it's good to explore and to try and find out to see what you could do to make it better. So looking at the reference node, the references have. When I look at your references, I'm seeing a bunch of different style helmets. So I might try doing different style helmets. I see different hairstyle. So I'll try the different hairstyles. So let's see what I can do here. Which element should I try foods? I'm going to try this one down here. See how that looks. This helmet kinda wraps around the head entirely. I still like the fact that I'm not showing her eyes. I want to keep that. Look back at the helmet. It wider. I'm going to keep these had designs are off because I don't want to spend too much time on them. I want to get Dong as much versions as possible. I'm going to try different hair style for this one, I'll try maybe day long. And it's just like this. So this option. So let's move on. Excuse me. Let's move on to another version. Let's see. We could try the helmet with device up here, this one. For this one I think I because there's a visor, I'll try occlusion with eyes. Now it's pretty risky to try design without eyes, because the eyes are the most expressive thing. On the human fears. Eyes and eyebrows. So do it. Design and our face and eyes is a big limits. Right? To another one. Let's try this helmet. And who your style? Which is more of Cara. I'm going to try and stay the same, the structure, because I really like it. I'm not going to. Try and change that too much and make things too complicated. I'm gonna play around with the ear style. I haven't really come up with any that I think would do the first version yet. So I'm going to keep going. Maybe I reach runaway. I'm kinda like, oh, I can't seem to choose. This hairstyle kinda change, changes the character a bit. I'm not sure about that one. We could do a version where she does not have hair sticking out of the helmet. Maybe just a little but not too much. Solid way. This one looks a bit too masculine, so I'm not sure if I'll do that one either. Might try. One more here. I'll try it again. I'll trial version with eyes. So this is basically me designing in real time. See, this is exactly how I go. I'm not leaving out anything right now. This is my process. Anything I might actually leave all of that you won't see as maybe me doing a number of different versions. Maybe I do more versions of screen. But basically my process, a way to help but just try it. If you have an idea and you don't think it might work, it might still want to try it to see just the visual E habit. Don't want to lose. Interesting. Since one I kinda like The goes on the helmet. I really like there's a mystery and not see in her eyes. I really, really like that. I don't know if it's because of this theme and who the character is supposed to be. But I really like the fact that the helmet is covering her eyes and you get a mystery from that. And you maybe would need to look at the rest of the character's body. In order to see the expressions and reactions and stuff? No. I'm seeing some from the reference that they have like some fees being done stuff over their eyes. So I'm actually going to try and do version with the eyes. Some fees and hoops. There are so many different versions of eyes I could draw. I wanted to seem tough. Face beans seem like something that would really make an intermediate in. Kinda looks good. If these beans, I don't think the fee is bandwidth look good with all the, i's. So I'm probably either going to have to do a version. If there is face paint, it's going to need to have the ice. Is no eyes. I'm probably not going to diffuse pain because the helmets diversion with development isn't going to have much space to draw a face paint. Because I'm gonna be poverty led to the nose. I don't know why that seems to make a see more tough. Like with the eyes. I have no idea why that's appealing to me so much of it. Later. Let's see what. And I can paint. Some would face paint running right across if I'm really liking the plots. And too long here. I'm not like an evolution with the short hair or that much. I'm really taking that into consideration. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to now, I could keep going and keep exploring and it's something you should do. But I don't want to be like creating this really, really long video of me drawing like 20 different versions. So just for the sake of time, and just to get the point across quickly, I'm going to pick out the ones that I liked the most and start refining those even more. Like. I might just make, put the heads that I liked the most on the body and see how they work and then decide them. So I'm gonna do that now and jump, jump over to that. Okay guys, so what I did was that I took my favorite head sketches from the previous rough designs. And what I did is I attached them to the body. And I looked at them together in a row so I could really see them side-by-side and see which ones I really, really like. And after looking at all three of them, 123, I decided I would go with number three because I really like the idea of how AND the face paint. And I really, because this is an introductory class and in the further classes we can do expressions. I want to show you guys these are designed with a full face. So I will be going with the design with the eyes. And I really like how it looks overall. I really think it kinda edges out the first two designs. So I will be going with this, with this design for the further classes. So what we will be doing now is that I will be telling you guys your assignment and we will be wrapping up this class now, because in the next class, what we're going to focus on is we're gonna do a character sheet and maybe some expression sheets and really show the design of the characters. So let's move on to your assignment now. 7. Character Design Lesson 7 Character turn arounds and charactrer expressions: In this lesson, we're going to talk about creating a character turn around and character expressions. Now, the reason you would need to create the correct It's in her arms and expression in a production pipeline for a TV show. That the storyboard artist and the animators could refer back to these models sheets and you can see the characters and how to draw the characters while they work, right? This is mainly done for reference. So I'm going to show you how I go about creating these characters in earnings and character expressions, right? So we're going to start off with the character Tinia wrong. So I have the front view of my character here already on the canvas. And what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna show you how you can draw the back of the character without too much trouble. So the first thing I usually do is that I will draw some guidelines. Alright? So the guidelines will help me see the tippy top of the character. All right, through here. And then the lowest point down here, right? Guides to exactly where the top and the bottom of the characters. No, I'm not going to redraw the character. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to do another short and I'm gonna copy the front of the character. This is a little trick. I do. Enjoy the back. I'm going to transform it horizontally. All right, so I flipped it horizontally. Now, when I go to draw the back, I'm just going to reduce the opacity. And I'm going to go in now and draw the character as though she's facing the back. Alright. The guidelines will come in handy because then I could see where I am. Right. Now. This is going to be rough as well. Because I haven't really spend any time doing any of the designs of the back of her. So I'm going to keep it off just in case I need to make changes or do any kind of edits. So I'm using the front as a guide. But I'm drawing her because I'll have the overlaps of the back would be different, but the overall silhouette would be technically to see them. So you're going to have to adapt in some areas. And then you could probably just redraw some of the areas. They seemed like the arm era here you would have to draw it differently. This would be the back of her palms here. So it will be like the opposite. So you'd probably see her thumb here. On the same side. On the left-hand side you'll see a thumb. Because remember this is the back. And then going to continue dawn. Alright. So this leg is actually on the front, will be in the back. On the opposite side. Now we have the knee pads, so we won't see any nepa adds. The buck, stops with any bad. All right. Now this is gonna be a bit different, so know that it's swapped around the ankle here. And then the front of the foot there. Same thing with this angle would be here. In front of the foot would be there. Alright. No, we draw an arrow to use the guide. I'm forgot that the guy who was there. All right. Everyone, I finish this. I'll just make adjustments if it's not working. So coming down this way. Right? I believe the pods on the elbows would probably be similar to the front because it's going to ride around the arm right there and for the gloves. All right. Now, since she's putting her chest out, she probably has maybe four wrinkled here. As it cools, stretching that helmet. Alright. No. Zoom out of there. And we remove that. We could have the CNN Clara know the Buck. She probably would have. Maybe. I'll play a number to the back. Let's just put a random number, 27 maybe. Right there you have the back of the character and I'm not liking hold this leg is positioned. So I'm going to comment on more this way. Thick. Again, I'm not really scared of being or off because you can always clean up this after I, once you're happy with it. Alright? Maybe some detail on the shoes. And then we have a very long socks. So you can double-check to see what probably a missing and just added in some more. It goes there. All right, so there we have the back of our character. Now, if we are going to do, Let's see, this side. This side is a bit more tricky on me. Just move these guys over one space. Now this side is a little more tricky. So what I do decide is that I draw some more guidelines. So once your guides are in there, you can reduce the opacity just to see it. Do a new layer. So now that we have, when I'm willing to actually do is I'm going to copy this again. Place it over here. Make sure it's then going to reduce the opacity. And then I'm gonna work on this side. So the head position will probably remain the same. I have up here. See, I'm using the front pose as a guy. Tell me rough in angle. Who's going to be spread apart or off everything for her legs are spread apart and you join the side angle, that means a bit higher up than they need closest to you. So because there's some distance in between from this leg to this leg, there will be some foreshortening going on. Okay. I think I need to redraw this on. And I think I need to redraw this one. So a lot of mistakes get made during this. That's okay because we can always fix. All right. Now, the arms are coming out this way. So you're going to need to know some foreshortening. Foreshortening skills is going to have to be point here. I don't think bellies out big. So go Sox. I think a head is tilted back a bit. Helmet is coming. Alright, so we have this drop of the helmet and then we have a pointy tools coming out to the front. Troy and the fingers. Alright. So you have a rough side view there. I still think there's legs look a bit awkward. Redraw that it looks like it's coming out. I think I may need to do it anymore here. That looks better. I just draw something or off the placeholder there. Alright, so we're going to draw the nose, eyes. This is pretty rough, so I can always clean this up later. You don't have to worry about being too rough is all about getting the character. She does all about getting the proportions right. And then you could clean up and tighten up later. All the different V2. So it's been good shorts would be more like this. You probably won't see that, but I need to draw and elbow mean here. All right. And then she has a tattoo. Face needs a lot of cleaning up. But just to get a point across for now here we have. All right, so here we have our first dinner wrong. So this is like the most basic tuner, only good to have. Some people, depending on your style and you know the production demands, they would draw a three-quarter view or a different view. This is the bare minimum front, back, and side. And you see like you have the guides, you stay within the guides. You try not to break the guides. If you think something is off, you can always check it guides or draw more guides. And try and adjust. And the guides will help you with most of the things, but there are certain, certain parts of the body that would be in different perspectives. So you'd have to adjust those, like say for the feet here, right. Because excuse me, because this is the back. New rollerblades would be going away from you. So the perspective would be different. And it's the same thing with the arms to the side and all you have to adjust for the perspective on with the arms here. I have to make sure I draw the thumbs company because they are the buck or the width. All right, so certain things you have to pay attention to when you're drawing it on our own. So this is the reveal minimum, basic knowledge you need to know about in her arms. You need to draw a front and back. And I said and be clear. So when somebody is using your designers or reference, they can understand what they need to know about the character, right? So it's pretty simple. You just need to do a lot of practice are different characters and you will be able to get it down as quickly and effectively as possible. So next we're going to move on to character expressions. Okay, everyone. So what we're gonna do now is we're going to do a correct expression sheet. And basically what that is for those who don't know. It's you're drawing your character in different emotions, happy, sad, angry, etc. Now the reason why you would have to do this is again, for the same reason that you would do a character turn around sheet so that the rest of the production line or the B the animator to store bought out is they can reference the character expression sheet when they're doing their work. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to show you how I go about doing the expression sheets. And yeah, I'm going to do some basic emotions. And how I go about doing it is that I got some are friends of the emotions, whether it's happy or sad. In this example, we have a girl who's happy. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use this as a reference to draw the happy emotion. Now for me, I am totally honest with myself. I try not to be too egoistic and think that I could draw every emotion out of my head. So I still try and use reference. And so for this one, I'm going to use this as a reference for happiness. And what I would do is to make my life even more easier. Actually, draw, I would draw the character and they seem pause just to make my life easier. Now because you've just designed a skirt, it might take you some time to be able to know how to draw her or him very well. Because remember, you've designed something that never existed before. And just because you designed it, that doesn't mean you would automatically know how to draw the boost and very well because you just design something and you yourself need some time to figure out how to draw your own character. And the tough thing about doing a character expression is that you need to keep it character on Model and don't. The car, the morph into a different character. So that's the difficult part with these things. They try and keep it on. You don't have to worry about being clean again. You could keep it rough at this stage. And then you can always come back and make your adjustments. And don't be too hard on yourself. If you did enjoy, it, could do for this time. All right. Join the helmet. So keeping it rough. Put in. All the features. All right. Make a little more happy. Doesn't look that happy. I think it's because the eyebrows need to change. The eyebrows. Such a big indicator of emotion. And they didn't draw them. And the happy emotion to try them. Know when you're happy. And I post them to be high. Now in real life, when I'm looking at this or friends. But I first probably are reused, but because they're not exaggerated, it wouldn't get to see it. So in animation, you know, everything is exaggerated. So you would need to exaggerate to make the emotion. Read, Clara. Alright, I'm gonna put the face paint right up to her forehead and then come back. This way. She doesn't seem very mean and this bit, it looks more soft. I think I may need to come back to this to make some adjustments, but this happy emotion, good work for now. Alright. So I'm going to move on to the next emotion. What do we have next? We have angry, so do that on a new layer. Alright, so this one might be a bit more fun. So this one is a big stretch. So there's gonna be some distortion and the characters fees. So I want us to make sure I'm keeping it on model and not make her look like a totally different character. And again, to make my life easy, I'm using the same position as the reference. Alright. So let's see, I might need to exaggerate the expressions and the eyebrows. Put some more wrinkles are all in. But a lot of emphasis on them. All right, I need to make the face even longer. So as you go along, you will need to adapt and make changes as necessary. She's really stretching out a jaw here, so I'm going to need to make more room. And putting the fears these eyebrows aren't aligned with, didn't know. So I need to make an adjustment there. I might need to come back to those eyebrows because I think I could exaggerate that more, but let's try and enjoy the rest of the fees. No sense of faces like stretching. I'm gonna guess that this trap for the helmet is going to be extra tight so it may come in into the fees squeeze. Feasible. They're projecting nose. Know the angle of her head is a bit too box. So you might see right under the helmet here, bit of perspective, choppy and it is met. And now we could go in and do the eyes. Now when somebody has angry eyes, they tend to be squinted down. A bit more sharp as compared to when they're happy. Maybe some more wrinkles here to emphasize the anger. All right. We could put in the Philippines. Looks pretty aggressive here, right? No. This is a little trick I like to do. Oh, it's not really a trick is something I noticed in Studio Ghibli films. When a character gets angry. The characters, Studio Ghibli films would have like, you know, something, the emotion comes through in their hair. So I kinda like to do that now. So the head would be like kinda raised up. Like, you know, when an animal in a while or like a cat kinda feels threaten their food, raises up or something like that. Kinda like to add that to the hair. So I do not know. Mostly for anger and divisions angry and raise their head up. I think behaves a bit off model, but I can fix the fix that later. All right, so there we have anger. I got something. I'll please hold that it. Alright, so let's move on to the next one, which is confused, confused right? Next year. Now, since this emotion is kinda street on a street on there. So now when someone is confused them, wait till their head. So I might not stick with de-reference this much. And maybe character tilde had a really tough to learn your own character that you designed. I'm going to go right into the eyes. One time. She has fairly thick eyebrows. So I learned how to draw this confused look from Aaron Blaise. How to draw the eyebrows like a swoop like this. The top one. Here and then the bottom one here. He always says try and make it feel as though it's on the same muscle and not break it up like this. Try to make it swoop on the same line. Quick tip. Let's get back to this. No, I kinda like There's also another tip I learned from Aaron Blaise, which is The more than sign. When drawing expression like this, you would draw the top eyebrow here, bottom eyebrow, and the nose. And then the mode would come this way. So it's kinda like, uh, more than sign. So you kinda go with this sign. So this top I would be smaller because it is closer to being squashed in here. This I B, I think I need to raise an eyebrow. It isn't exaggerated enough. Let me draw this. I first show it all the way up here. That looks way better, way better. Exaggeration always makes things look better. And following that same rule I just told you about. She has she has lipstick. Yeah, I think that's all for models. So let me try again. She has fairly wide loops. So how does it confuse mode? Look, I think it's point the eyes. So let's see how this looks. Even though I still think it's off model. I don't want to draw her with us. Smile because that'll be a different emotion. I think then I need to draw something, something more neutral, foot confused. Draw a little on lead gen as though she's getting up, pulling up confused and annoyed. And it looks like the same thing. I'm thinking this looks more like annoyed, but you might be confused with what the teammates is saying. She's like, What are you saying? What are you talking about? As I might need to bring all that element of it, maybe. Depends on how it looks at things pants. And enjoyed right though. Alright, good intro to hear. My try and get that same feeling. And express a Trudy here. I'm going to draw this side can dawn. Very rough. And then this one I might try and puff it above it. But I'll contrast. So she's kinda thing in her shoulder up on this side. Maybe she's doing both shoulders. All right. I'm really need to bring that helmet bone is a bit too high. Right above the eyeball. It looks better for now. Let's move on to the next emotion. Let me just erase this here. So you can want it in this last one, a very basic one. Sad. Surely let me move this up here. So I get work down here, closer to the reference. Again. We go indefinitely getting a lot of practice drawing your character, doing this. Jacqueline sadness now. Sad, not sadness. Know what sadness. You try and squash stuff down a bit because, you know, when we're happy we can expand our self and when we sowed, we kind of put ourselves in. So I'm going to try and pull things in. So the helmet is gonna be a little extra little. The head isn't going to be that the eyebrows are slanted. Don Woods. I'm going to have to exaggerate and more than the reference, feel as though I could slanted more to make it feel even more sad. She just maybe lost again. I feel as though this character would feel angry rather than side if she lost the game. To probably be sad for something else. That knows is a bit of model. What I want to be. I don't want any nostrils. Can I just want one ship me go pull t. When I was thinking of this character, I never imagined like seeing her sad because I think she's like this tough, you know, rural literally listen. You probably wouldn't even see sad story I had in my head. So during sad seems so foreign to me for this character. But you need to do it because everyone feels sad at some point and you never know if the guard bill will feel sad. Whatever story. Joints. I really think I need to slide those eyebrows if it isn't being blocked by the helmet strap. Know it's sad I'm going to make the hair droop. Unlike CO and this first one here, it's kind of popping out. I'm going to make it true as though it's a wet because I really want to make her seem small. I might even drop the helmet some more, like right above the eyebrows. For me. Really sad. Sad eyes. No, I don't think I need to put tears, but I do need to bring those eyebrows, nose. I mean, to put your wrinkles, you get one year frowning. Again, also need to bring up the chin. God, I really want to make everything really pack for this side. I just want everything to just close up and make a few of the really small. I mean, you could see like compared to the younger, everything's kinda spread out. Everything's much wider. And this side one I kinda squishing everything they own. She's been defeated. She made me lost a friend and just kind of imagine like a story in my head too wide. This character would be sad. No face that do not have prominent. And there we have it. So there we have some basic emotions for our expression sheet. And you can too, they're so much more emotions. You could do reaction shots. You can just do like situational emotions. But for now, because this suggests an introductory class, we're going to just focus on the basic emotions. Alright, We did happy here. P, we did confused, angry, and sad. Now we're going to move on to the assignment and you probably already know what your assignment is now. So let's get to that. 8. Character Design Lesson 8 Character Poses: Okay guys, Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to talk about character poses and corrected gesture. So here I have my character, my fully designed character, Roller Derby girl, that goes along with my theme. And what are we going to do is that we're going to start drawing a character poses. And again, character poses. Just reference for the animators, storyboard artist to see how the character looks and acts. So how I go about doing character poses is that I go back and I gather up some reference material. Right now. I, my, my theme is Roller Derby. So what I did is what? I went on YouTube and I went on Google Images and I sewage rule Adobe. And I looked at the pauses that I think my character would be in and would suit my character. And those are the references that I filled it out into these. Alright, so what I'm gonna do is just I'm going to reference these poses and I'm going to draw my character in these poses, right? So let's start off with a pretty simple one. We'll go with this one here first. So I have to kind of move back and forth. So you guys could see, alright, again, means to me. So we can focus on this pose. All right? So let me do that on a new layer. So when you're doing your character poses, again, you have to pay attention to the shape of your character. And usually when I'm doing multiple bruises, what I would do is I would actually draw the character poses first without much detail. And then I would go in and make adjustments. The detail that you need to after my first pores, right? No, looking back at my reference, I need to move this across a bit more space. Now, one thing that is really, really important, withdrawing your character poses is having a really good understanding of gesture. And basically, for those of you who may not know, gesture is basically capture in the action of a character and not necessarily the anatomy and warn about the anatomy. It's more about what is, what is this character doing? What, you know? Is he running as you're walking, as, you know, and communicate and not action clearly. So that's why so far I'm just focused on the pose of the character. And again, we want to make sure it stays on Model and it communicates the pose of the character accurately. So I'm going to tweak this a bit. All right. I'm actually going to bring this leg up. Now. You see once once I haven't started the detail, I can make adjustments to the gesture easily without getting too frustrated with making mistakes and not getting it right the first time. Normally if I draw the pose of the character and I think I get pushed the balls even more. I will push the pause more again before I start worrying about detail. So in the reference, her leg is actually bent, but I want to get that feeling of going really fast in that direction. So you don't have to worry about this size yet. You can always make adjustments to that later for you. Push it. I just focus on the gesture. Alright, so i'm, I'm liking this post. I'm going to put all the detailed us. Yeah, right, So this is basically my first pose for this character. And I'm going to move on to the next pose. Pools. Actually, I'll move this one down there, create a new layer and work on the next pose. So the next pose, I think I will try. I'm really liking this pose here. This one here. So I'm gonna work on that one until all characters are, all my characters are relatively character. So a lot of the pose is going to be the character on roller skates. So when you're drawing or deciding on what Paul is, is you're going to choose for your character. You want to try and choose pauses. That a lot different and a lot dynamic poses where you could see a lot, a lot of different parts of the character. And you don't want to draw a bunch of poses that, you know, they only show the front or the character they don't show like decide or true quarter or any of those things. So you'll want to keep it dynamic. Now, I'm just using, if you'll notice the references, I'm kinda pushing the references again because I want the pose to feel really dynamic. So again, knowing gesture, well will come in really handy. And doing these poses. All right. Got a lot of that movement. Just move this across this way. Again. You don't need to be super clean at this stage. Just keep it rough. Finally, pauses. Find the mass of the character. Make sure everything matches up to your original model because you don't want to change things, right? And make sure you're happy with the pause before you move on to the next pose. Because once you start adding detail, you don't want to have to go back and make a big change to the polls because he just realized that you didn't like it and that can be frustrating sometimes. So this is my second poll is, let's look at it. Alright, so we have the character to skate and positions. Right? Now. I'm going to move this one across down here. So there we have two poses already. Those are two action poses. Some gonna do something a bit more stationary. So let's try this pose here. It's a bit more stationary. We can do here. Again, don't be afraid to look back at your friends, your references there to help you. It's not dare to be copied entirely, but it's dear to help you. They go to pause. Maybe you could use, just use the reference as inspiration for oppose that totally different from the reference. That's fine as well. Sometimes I would start off with a reference and then I get totally inspired by the pores and see something else that I could try and deposes end up being two or three different. I don't know if that will happen here, but if it does, you'll see that if it doesn't, hopefully my explanation sheds some light on that. Alright. So this is more of a stationary pools character is moving across the floor. No. I would do like a whole bunch of different poses. And if they're poses, I don't like, I would just know it, I get rid of them or just draw a new pool is like say if I were to do six different poses and I didn't like one, I'll just do a new pause. I wouldn't try and make that pause force that pulls to fit like this pause. It's not that great because it doesn't have a good silhouette. Silhouette isn't really that good. So I'm not sure if that pulls would make it to the end. But I would keep it for now. And I would go onto a next, next pose, which could be stuff. I'm going to try this one here. It's very dynamic pose again. Hopefully it fits in this corner. All right, As I said before, I like to keep, keep it dynamic so you could see the characters from different angles. Might be sounding like a broken record, but repetition is all the things stick. I'll keep saying it just in case it slips out to your mind. Know, even I've designed this character, I haven't fully fleshed out her personality. All I have is like this really vague ideas of who she is or what she could be. So what I'm trying to say is that the poses that I could draw, it could be a little more intimate. More of who, who personality is. Right now, these poses good fit like any rule Adobe character, I'm guessing. And they don't really show who puts them out beyond the sport. So you can have different poses. You can have a more intimate setting, interacting with someone else, doing something Monday and not hood character would do. But right now, I haven't figured out all those details. As a character designer, you probably won't have to worry about that. I wouldn't be in a job description. But just something to keep in mind. Alright, so there we have four pauses. We have 12 tree for most of them, I didn't really change from the reference. But what are we gonna do now is we're gonna go over these poses and site adenine that detail so you could see more of the character, right? So let us start with the first one that we did. Right? Now what I'm going to do, supposedly as here. Alright? So I'm going to reduce the opacity of this and zoom in a bit. Actually, I'm going to go into carry this up so I can see the reference. Now, I am going to start adding in. Some more detail. Now, this, this past that I'm gonna do. Now, It's still going to be a bit rough, but it's going to have more detail. And it's going to be fleshing out the character. Some, all right. So nothing to, to, to, to clean. A lot of people they tried to do clean instantly. You don't have to. It's all about getting it done right foods. You have to make sure all the important stuff is really, really important stuff is there first before you do detail. So I'm still going to keep my reference there. Yes, I could refer back to the pool was perspective. So as I go along and I do a new layer, I want you guys to notice how I just subtly adding more detail to the character. Definitely going to make some mistakes in this process. And that's why I'm keeping it rough right now because I still, I'm not a 100% sure of where everything goes and all the perspective and all the details. So still figuring stuff out. I'm, I'm, I'm looking at this arm. I'm thinking that the perspective is off. So I'm gonna look back at my reference. I think it's this leave. I'm not sure if I should enjoy it. Like Coleman, right above her shoulder here. So I'm still, you know, figuring out I still have some problems. I have to make sure we get all foods before I do like the last last clean up. My first rough version, I didn't even draw the wheels. I'm going to add those in this past for sure. Alright. I find this leg is looking a bit too thick. Then that down a bit. Bringing her back a bit here. I think I may need to redraw this arm because as I clean it up, I'm noticing that it looks it doesn't look absolutely right. I'm gonna do a quick rough because she's charging forward. I'm adding in more detail. So I'm making things a little more clear for myself. So when I actually go in to do the actual cleanup, you know, things will be a little more Clara and my lying wouldn't be so fury. Now what I'm gonna do here, since the most of her width is on this, I'm going to actually be exaggerated and squish the wheels a bit. As though she's like squeezing down on the wheels, even though that probably wouldn't happen in real life. Exaggerate that feeling and should add center wheat, which is pretty cool. Now given that, give the gesture bit more life. Right? Now. Let me go. I might need to go back and fix that. So so I'm gonna do something a little bit weird here just so I could keep looking at the face. I'm going to bring it across like this. Really weird. But yeah, go on the face. Now, this pose is very aggressive, so I'm going to try and make aggressive. And this facial expression very aggressive. And again, it doesn't have to be super clean dishes on the other side. All right. So I'm going to move her back over. All right. Alright. So I'm gonna try and fix this. So bear with me. I have to look back at the reference and make an adjustment. I think the shoulders too far down. Making it look a bit weird. Perspective still gives me trouble. As you could see. Some occasions. She's going forward, so breeds would be going back. All right. Now, I'm trying to give her a logo. I haven't I don't know what the logo is yet, so yeah, sounds like a placeholder there for the logo. I'm going to make a stomach come in a bit here. Let us craziness going on here. That's why it's so rough, still. Keeping it off. Before I did brought versions, I didn't, I actually didn't do as much rough illusions like this. And go over the piece and, you know, try to find the right pool is on stuff I would get so frustrated when I realized I read so far, added so much detail and then I realize, Oh, that arm is not working, that this pose not working. A lot of things aren't looking and I get frustrated and I just, you know, get complacent and just leave it at that. Alright, I'll show some movement lines just to be fancy, I probably won't even have them in the final solution. Alright? Alright. So this is the second pass on the same pose. Now, what I'm gonna do now is I'm actually going to go and do another pass and try and clean it up. I'm trying to create and talk as much as the reference that I'm using right now, the first reference. So again, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to drop the opacity, right? And go on a new layer, start cleaning up. So normally I would do the pauses, like all the pauses and all the second pass and the second row of Sunday to Ross altogether. You know, I want to keep these classes short and concise and get the information across as quickly as possible. So I'm not gonna do all of them in the same video because it's basically the same process. And it says repeated with different poses. So I'm just going to explain the process used in one pose. And then you guys can just use it as a reference. Working on your poses. So as you can see now that I did this second pass, it made it easier for me to do a cleaner version now because the second rough pass cleaned up stuff and made depose and some other details a bit more clearer. So I won't be guessing as much. In this case I'm stage. He could leave the guessing to probability second. Second pass. No, I wonder if I should put the here in front of the shoulder behind. So sometimes you encounter some things and you have to make some decisions. Alright? So this is going to be much faster cleanup process. This is going to be a faster process. Now, sometimes I would get like a full cleaned up version on the third pass. But sometimes I would still, maybe if I still think things need a little more tightening up and, you know, a little more clarity. I would do afford paths a clean it up even more. And I will personally, for me, cleanup isn't as fun as actually coming up with the the actual causes or doing the rough sketch. You know, all the all the fun thing good and stuff is gone or door. I know it's just about refining. And, you know, refining could be fun for some people. But I find that, you know, like your real fun is doing the rough sketch and coming up with the pores. And I guess this process is pretty straightforward. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to speed up this video so you can see how it looks after this path. And then we can move on to your assignment. So let's do that now. Alright guys, and then we have the first pool is fully cleaned up. So basically this is what I want you guys to do for your assignment. I want you guys to do some research, gather some reference to help you guys and do at least, at least four pauses. If you can, you can do six. You could actually do as many as you want to get a few Fate character and do those pauses and get them ready. And then in the next class, what we're gonna do is we're going to talk about how you choose the colors for your character and find the red colors and create an incident options. So good luck guys, and see you in the next class.