Character Design for Picture Books, Part 1

1. Introduction: Want to wave energy and personality into your picture book characters. This class is part one of a series. In this class, we learn how to create our characters and then how to get them moving around. In the next class that's going to be part two, I'm going to show you my best tricks on how to draw characters consistently when you have to draw a full bookworth of characters. And then in the third part for this class, I'm going to show you how I develop and draw animal characters. So in this class, we'll start from the basics on how to design characters. We'll talk about finding your style and kind of your shape language that you're comfortable with, and then including details that help tell the story of your characters. And then we'll spend some time breathing life into our characters by learning how to draw active expressions and poses. By the end of the class, you'll have a set of two characters that you'll be able to use in your portfolio or in a picture book dem. Hi. I'm Mirka, and I'm an award winning author and an illustrator, and I worked with publishers big and small for the past five years. I've created a range of books from graphic novels to picture books and non fiction. I'm passionate about kids books and love sharing what I've learned along the years as an artist and an illustrator. This series is great for beginners to learn how to illustrate for children's books and for intermedia illustrators who might still feel insecure in one or more areas of posing characters, expressions or drawing people or animals. I can't wait to see the cute characters you create in class. Let's go. 2. Class Project: A. Hi, I'm so glad that you join me in this class. Now, if you think about character design, there are a lot of classes that are geared more towards kind of animation or for game design. And while some of those principles that apply to those character designs are kind of universal and they go for all of them, I feel like there's a lot of things that are different when it comes to picture book character design. For example, if you think about character design for animation or, like the games that I mentioned, those characters have to be able to move in kind of three dimensions. They are they move in space, we see them moving. And so it's not just like when you're illustrated in a picture book, it's just a snapshot of just them in one pose, but we have to be able to see them in always. And so those characters are always a little bit more fleshed out. They may or may not have outlines, but they're kind of rendered in even if they have flat colors, they're still kind of three dimensional in the way that they move in space. Now, on the other hand, if we think about picture book illustration, there is a much, much wider variety of illustration styles that appear in picture books compared to movies and TV. Because like I said earlier, the characters only have to be in that kind of one pose per page or on the spread. And so, you know, the outlines can be really sketchy or it can be watercolor, and it can be washes. And so picture book character design just allows for a lot more variety than what game or, you know, movies and TV animation. Might allow. And so kind of the general guidelines that I think about when I work on picture book characters is in general for picture books because it is for younger audiences. Simpler lines, simpler just a simpler style in general general works a little bit better than if you think about animation or game design where the characters have a lot of lines and they're drawn a lot of times a little bit more in detail and they have a lot more details in their dress and stuff like that. For picture books, a lot of times it works a little bit better when it's a little bit simplified and just simpler lines and simpler kind basic shapes that you are working with. And then because we are not animating, we are not moving our characters on the page. I also feel like another important point is being able to that one pose that you're putting your character in, you have to be able to convey the mood not only in the face of the character, but only in also in the way that they're posing. So if somebody is bored, you know, they're not just like bored in their face, but you have to show you how, you know, if they're slumping or, you know, however in their body language, how they are feeling as well. And so because the body language is very important when we are looking at still pictures, the movement that you are conveying and the action and the energy that you have in your illustrations and in your characters is also very important. And as the fourth point, I feel like in picture book, it's also important to be aware of appealing kind of shape language and appealing characters and appealing color palettes. So at the end of the class, you'll have two characters that you've had designed that are from the same story that you can use for your portfolio or for a dummy. For the class, I've chosen the story of the giant turnip, and I chose that story because it's a folk story, so it's in the public domain. And also that story has a whole cast of characters. It's got a grandpa, a grandma, a granddaughter, a dog, and a cat, and a mouse. And so you can pick two characters for this class from that story. Or then if you have your own story or a dummy that you are working on, you're welcome to pick any other characters as well. But I'll be working from the Giant turnip. The manuscript for that story is in the resources section of the class. You can download it from there. And because I'm planning on another part of this class that will cover how to do animal sketches or animal characters for books. For this class, I'm going to be concentrating mainly on human characters. So I'll pick two of the people from that story to work on. During the class, I'm going to be sharing examples from my own work, and we are going to be looking at a lot of other books and characters that other people have designed. And then I'm going to be sharing some exercises and tips on how to think about creating style your style and characters, and also to build up your character design skills. So all the resources, the books that I'm using in this class, the story of the Giant turnip, those are all going to be in the resources section as a PDF that you can download as part of the class. And you can choose to share any of those exercises that you've done in the project section in our class or in the discussions if you are looking for feedback for your character designs. Or you can share a final scene that you create with the two characters interacting using all the skills that you've learned in this class. I'm going to be using Procreate on the iPad for this class, but you are welcome to use paper and pencil or photoshop or any other digital program that you might have. The skills that I'm teaching are not specific to the programs that I'm using, but I've learned that using Procreate or Photoshop or other digital programs just makes for a little bit of a faster workflow because I can copy layers and then draw on top. But you could also do that if you have tracing paper or a lightbox to just have your underlying sketch and then put another piece of paper on the top and then draw through. Now, let's get ready to design some cute characters full of energy and personality. 3. Character Exploration & Gut Reactions: Okay, so let's get started with our character design. If I have a manuscript that I'm already working with, what I do is, I usually read it a few times and then scan for the following things. So one, I look for the easy kind of low hanging fruit. I look for any kind of character descriptions, anything that has to do, you know, obviously with their gender. If there's anything about hair color, clothing they might be wearing the time period that they're living in. You know, just anything that you can see that's there that describes the character and kind of where they live. So number two, is I kind of look at how they act or behave or react in a book. I look at, you know, are they submissive, or are they really spunky or fiery or you know, kind of what their kind of general character is and how they react in situations. And then that will kind of guide me in, you know, giving me ideas or kind of gut reactions on what kind of clothing I want them to wear or, you know, and like, if they do kind of specific things, then I know like, if they're I don't know, a ballerina or something, then obviously, you know, to put them in a ballerina outfit. Or then if you have really strong characters, that might also affect or give you ideas of some of the accessories they might have. So for example, Fancy Nancy, she has a lot of kind of jewelry, and she's kind of over the top all the time or Olivia, the pig. She usually wears kind of very plain outfits, but then she's got this artistic flair to her. And so a lot of times you'll see her in some kind of interpretive outfits, I guess, you could say. Or if you look at the book, know David by David Shannon, you'll notice that in a lot of the pictures, like, David has, like, saw tooth, saw teeth, and that's kind of, you know, goes with the characteristics of the book where, you know, David is doing all these kind of bad things. And so, you know, these are kind of things that I try to note down and get kind of gut reactions on how I feel like the character is and who they are and how they're going to be behaving in the book. So third, what I try to do is pay attention to the scenes or kind of the background, where the book happens, if it's on a farm, they might be dressed in overalls or if we're in the city, what time period it happens, or are we going into the woods? Not only does it affect the clothing that they might be wearing, but it also can affect the colors of the clothing. I recently worked on the book that happened in the fall. And so there was usually I dress my characters a lot of times they'll have red on their outfit, but it happened in the fall, and there's going to be a lot of yellows and reds in the foliage all around the characters. And so I went exactly the opposite way with, you know, the forest being all warm colors, with the characters. I went with cool colors with blues. And so that way, they were able to stand out in the in the backgrounds of all the warm colors. And four. I'm also aware of the intended audience for my book. Picture books can kind of range in general from about, you know, a couple of years old up until about eight, 9-years-old. And there's a difference in the way that I would illustrate a book for a 3-year-old compared to the way that I would illustrate for an 8-year-old. Kind of, in general, the younger the audience, the younger, the who the book is intended for. I try to do more simple characters, more simplified shapes, cutter, kind of younger characters. And then kind of the older that your audience gets, the more kind of complex the characters get in the way that they're designed and in the way that they're drawn, and there's a lot more kind of line work and just kind of modeling in the characters. And granted, with picture books, it's never kind of a one size fits all, but those are kind of like the general general guidelines of how I design characters when I'm working with picture books. And if you are working on characters that you don't have a story for yet, you are just trying to work on a portfolio piece, perhaps. You can think about those above steps and think about who they are, what their personality is, kind of think about a little interview with that character, what are they afraid of, what their favorite food is, what gets them excited. You know, do they have maybe some hobbies? That might, you know, give you some clues into what they might be wearing, you know, again, the time period. And then that way, knowing your character, you know what their personality is, will help you then design that character and make it unique. And I wanted to just make a quick note about art notes that you might have when you receive a manuscript from an editor. So sometimes these manuscripts will have some art notes. And a lot of times they're kind of suggestive for you. It gives you ideas of what might be happening in scenes. And sometimes your editor might also give you kind of a little bit of a description of who they kind of see in their mind's eye as being the character for the book. And in general, for the art notes, like, you don't have to do exactly What they're more like suggestions. So if you feel like you have a better idea of what the scene could look like, then I've changed what you know, what was intended in the art notes to the final illustration. But if my editor has some specific things that they are looking for, I usually kind of heed their advice or their opinions. Unless I feel like, I have a better idea, and then I don't just bring a finished book with something else in it. I usually, then if I think I have a better idea or have an idea of how I want those characters to be, then I kind of consult and talk with my editors and art directors just to make sure that everybody's on board, and so there's no surprises when I turn sketches in, and it's something different than what they had envisioned kind of in the beginning. Right, so for this class, we are working on the story of the giant turnip. And so the gist of it is it happens on a farm. The farmer plants vegetables, and one of the turnip grows so large that he can't pull it out, and he increasingly enlists more characters to help him. So he asks his wife and then their granddaughter, the dog, the cat, and the mouse, and then the turnip finally comes out. So after I read the story a couple of times, I start I kind of make, you know, sometimes it's a mental list, and sometimes I'll actually make a physical list of kind of just some of the things that are going on with the book. So it happens in the garden, and there's going to be turnip. And then since this story is just kind of a suggestion. And, you know, we're not working with a publisher with this one. You can either kind of stick with the basic idea of the story. So this one happens, you know, kind of at a I would think, like a traditional farm. Maybe it could happen a little bit earlier, then, you know, you know, people could be wearing kind of traditional clothing. But if you wanted to, you could also kind of take the story and make it your own. So you could think about, you know, does it happen in a city, and maybe it's like a rooftop garden, or you know, could it be in space or could it be animals, who have, you know, maybe it's rabbits and they have a giant carrot that they grow, or you know, you kind of get the gist of what I'm talking about. There's so many different ways that you can take a simple story like this to make it more interesting and to make it more, kind of rich with the illustrations that you're adding to it. And so for this one, I know I wanted to do people, so I'm thinking I'm going to do the grandpa grandpa, and then I'm going to be doing the grandchild, or it's a girl. And so these are kind of the main characters that I'm going to be thinking about, and let's say, for this one, I'm just going to stick with that's going to be traditional. I mean, is it traditional American, traditional, you know, some other culture or if you're from, you know, a different country with a different cultural heritage, you know, use that heritage. You know, you can draw characters. I'm from Finland, and so the characters in general are kind of, you know, would probably be wearing fairly similar clothes to what they would have, you know, here in America, if I'm thinking, you know, maybe this happened in the I don't know, early 1920s or something like that. So traditional kind of clothing. And so I'm just trying to stay fairly traditional with this one. And just to I'm thinking that maybe that'll be, you know, something nice to add to my portfolio, just to have kind of some basic characters where when you look at the characters, you can immediately tell who they are. You don't have to have guesswork. Oh, and then thinking about the personalities, If I'm thinking about the old man or the grandpa, you know, he's probably lived kind of hard life. He's lived in the countryside. So he's probably pretty rankly. And if he's been, you know, farming for a long time, he might be kind of hunched over, not like hunchback of Notre Dame, but maybe he's a little hunched over. You know, he's probably also kind of dedicated or how would I say it? Kind of stringy, like he's been through a lot. And then I'm thinking the girl, like, he could be she could maybe she's visiting from the city. So maybe that would be kind of fun. That might be kind of fun. Maybe she's visiting from the city or something. And so maybe her clothing is a little bit more fancier. Maybe she's more lazy. Or maybe, well, if she's helping grandma grandpa, maybe she's not lazy. Maybe maybe she's kind of spunky. Maybe she'll have like headphones on her, you know, something like that or Walkman or I don't know something. And so maybe Grandpa's got traditional clothing, and I'm just going to put city clothing as a note for myself. So these are kind of maybe some general things that I'm starting to think about when we start working on these characters. And so you can kind of make some general notes for yourself on how you want to start going on this. And for the next video, I just wanted to make a quick distinction between character and plot driven stories and how some of that might affect the character design. 4. Character vs Plot Driven Stories: In this video, I just wanted to make kind of a short distinction between character and plot driven stories and how that might affect your character design. So a character driven story is one that has a strong character who leads the narrative. We focus a lot on their thoughts and their feelings and the decisions that they make, and the character often changes or develops during the book. And so with character driven books, the characters are usually strong, and we get a lot of insight into their personality. In a plot driven book, the story with the actions and an event that unfold is usually the main focus on the story. A lot of times there might be more characters than in a character driven story, and a lot of kind of nonfiction books or concept books fall in this category. And in a lot of these books, the characters don't even have names. And so here's just a few character based books that I brought. You know, we have Pete The Cat. For example, Im andata Fox, and in this book. So this is Ina of Fox by arena Wolf and Chuck Running. And so in this one, it's all about this fox and how they're feeling and how they want to be friends and fit in. Um, same thing kind of for my shape is Sam, by Amanda Jackson and Lydia Nichols. I'm sure everybody's familiar with the pigeon books. He's a very strong character with Penelope Rex. We don't eat our classmates. Another example, Swim gym, by Kaz Winnes. Another one, Betty Goes Bananas. And so in this book, for example, you know, we're immediately given, you know, everything about Betty. Betty was hungry. She saw banana. She wanted to eat it. But the banana would not open. And then we go, you know, it's all about her and what she's trying to do and her emotions. And, you know, we have this really fun kind of gorilla character in this book. Same thing. I have one Olivia book over here. She's a very precocious little pig, and you can see, and she's always, you know, dressed very well. And she's kind of rsi Psi, and so, you know, over here, she's not even wearing any clothes, but, you know, you can see the types of things she does. She's just a really fun character to see. And then I have one more book. This is a newer book. It's called Farah Loves Mangos. And so in this book, it's all about Cara, and and how much she loves mangoes. And then one year, her ground Bas mango tree was empty, and then we go into a big um thing about, you know, she's trying to trying to figure out how to get the mango tree to bear fruit, and you can see there's a lot of emotion. But it's, you know, all about her. And so with the character den books, you know, we usually have very strong character. We get a lot of insight into the personality. And that is helpful and gives us a lot to work with when we're working on character design and to make them a little bit more specific because we're getting so much insight into their kind of internal world. And but for these kinds of books, it's also important to nail the character design for these books because they are the main subject and kind of the center stage of what the book is about. And the way that we design the characters can really kind of make or break the book. And so we want to make sure that in character based books, our characters are memorable. And so, here's just a few plot driven books. So there's usually less information about the characters who they are. And so we have a little bit more freedom in choosing how to design them. And I feel like the characters in these kinds of books are a little bit more general in the way they look, and it's also a little bit less stressful for you, but, you know, that's just kind of generalities, and it's not always the case. Um, and so this one, it's about there's a nome. And so it's a little bit about the character, but it's not as much of like the internal thoughts and workings of the nome. It's really about this garden and how the nome, like destroys it, and how everybody else kind of reacts to it. So it's more about kind of the story instead of just the nome. Then I have grab that rabbit by Polly Faber and Briony Mae Smith. And so this one, we have kind of two characters. We have the lady and the rabbit. And so it's kind of the struggle between, you know, the bunny wanting to eat, the food in the garden, and then the lady wanting to stop it. I Mary Poppins, you're probably, you know, familiar with the story of Mary Poppins. And so it's not even though Mary Poppins is the main character, you know, there's other characters that are also important, and, you know, it's kind of the story of, you know, how the children, how Mary Poppins, you know, kind of comes into the life of the children and all the things that happens. Then just ask, this is almost more like a nonfiction book. And it's, you know, about different different people and how kind of different how they're different. And so somebody that, you know, Bianca has dyslexia, LJ sees the world differently because they're deaf. And so it's more about, you know, each page, so the plot of the book or, you know, every page is a different kind of disability and how those people are. And then everything you need for a treehouse is, you know, pretty obvious. It's all about building tree houses, and there's no, you know, specific characters in this book. And then collecting cats is also a really funny book. And it's, you know, no specific characters in this one. And it's, you know, about, you know, collecting cats and how the author decides they don't want to collect cats after all. But then there's also a lot of books out there that are kind of, you know, they're character based or plot driven stories, but then they also have kind of characters. And so this is just an example of that where we have, you know, the grandma is kind of the main character. We don't have a name for the grandma, but she's kind of the thing that's leading through and her frustration. And so I was having a hard time deciding which one it was. And so there's a lot of books kind of like this one. And then this is one of my favorite books too, Oh Nuts by Tammy Sauer and Dan Kraus. And it's about these three. You can see, we've read this book a lot. It's already broken. But it's about these three squirrels who live or chipmunks, who lived at the zoo, and they all kind of have different. And it's really fun. You know, they have their different personalities with like one's cute, and then the other ones, you know, kind of the guy. And then this one's kind of, you know, chunky one, and you can see when they're moving. You know, the chunky one is having kind of hard time. And, you know, the cute C will blink her eye lashes and whatnot, and somebody Cute C fluffed her fur. And, you know, they all have a little bit of different personalities, but it's still kind of their story on how they get annoyed at how everybody else loves all the other animals in the zoo, and they're not getting any They're not getting any attention at the zoo, and so it's a story of them getting the attention and they decide that they didn't want the attention after all. And there's a pretty fun plot, but also the characters are strong in this one. It doesn't necessarily have to be one or the other. It can be a little bit of both. I just wanted to make the distinction between two different kind of stories and how you might think about um, creating kind of more general characters for plot driven books and for character driven books, a little bit more important on what kind of how you portray the character and how they behave in all the books. And in the next video, we'll briefly discuss about books that where historical accuracy is important and how to do some research for that. 5. Historical Accuracy Tips: I wanted to make a really quick video just to talk about historical accuracy and how I would research that and work on creating character designs and, you know, clothing and stuff like that. So if you get a manuscript or you're working on a piece for your portfolio where historical accuracy is important, then you need to do a little bit more research for those illustrations. And so in general, I just end up working doing a whole bunch of Google Google searches, and if you are working on a famous person who's lived, for example, like AlbertEinstein, or Princess Diana, A lot of times you'll be able to find pictures of them online, and then that way you can reference the clothing and you'll be able to research where they lived and what the environments that they lived in looked like. And then that way you can use that for a reference. But if you're working on a little bit more kind of general, like let's say something like Anne of Green Gables or that happens kind of in a very specific time. It was the late 1800s when, you know, that book takes place. And so I've looked that up, and it's called the Edwardian era. And then what I would do is just go online and research Edwardian era, for example, just kids. And so let's see what a search like that would bring. Okay. So this is just so this is just a search I did on Google, an image search. And I typed in warden era, kids. And we also know from the book that Ann is about 11-years-old. And so when I'm looking for these pictures, I'll kind of, you know, try to reference kids who are around that age. And so what I would do is I would just find some of these pictures, like here's a nice picture of, you know, some kids in the schoolhouse, and I would save maybe this picture. A lot of times, you know, the stuff underneath will also bring you some more ideas. And so this one's up let's see. Well, there it is. And so I would either take a screenshot of this and then save it into my gallery, and I could either just choose to save maybe, like, these two girls over here. And then once I have a bunch of these pictures saved, then most of the time I will go and kind of type put everything onto kind of one canvas in procreate. And then that way, I can kind of reference everything together. And so if we look over here, so here's that school picture. A lot of these pictures, it looks like most of these they have, you know, they have kind of big poofy arms over here. I know a lot of them are kind of a lot of them are kind of blurry. These ones seem to be maybe a little bit richer, but we know that Ann was kind of poor. We see some poofy arms over here, and then a lot of the it seems to kind of end, you know, kind of short. Like the sleeves seem to end kind of halfway, you know, up their wrists, same thing over here. We have some poofy shoulders. Maybe a little bit less over. Well, actually, it looks like it's underneath over there. She's got poofy shoulders. Same over here. And same over here. So we probably, you know, she'll end up having some sort of a poofy shouldern. I think there was a scene in the book where she talks about the poofy shoulders, too. And then it looks like a lot of these, you know, they kind of live in the country a little bit, and so a lot of these have aprons, so maybe she might have been wearing an apron too. And so it's a great idea to kind of look at, you know, take a general picture of, you know, a general idea, get a general idea of what everybody is wearing or what the kids in that time period were wearing, and then you can kind of go from there. So maybe she is wearing some sort of an apron. And It seems like the way that the aprons in general look like they're either at the waist or a lot of them seem to be kind of they seem to be kind of tighter on the top. And then it seems to kind of balloon out. Like that. And then a lot of them have ruffles. Some of them have ruffles, some of them don't. Maybe if they're a little bit poor, maybe hers doesn't have ruffles on it. And then maybe she's got these poofy kind of sleeves with then the. And this is kind of how I would start working on sketching her. And then if you look at shoes, I know it's very blurry, but most of them are wearing these kind of lace up lace up boots and all these pictures. I think pretty much everybody is wearing it looks very dark kind of lace up boots. And so maybe Ann is wearing even the kind of younger kids. And so maybe she's wearing Lisa bots, too, and then we already know the color of her hair, and we know her age and so Rt, she's got red hair and freckles. And then she's got bids. And so, you know, I would use all this to kind of start working on a character sketch for her. And then obviously, the books happen kind of over a long period of time, so you could put her in different outfits too. But, you know, this just gives you a general idea of how I would start working on designing a character for something that's kind of a period piece where you want it to be historically accurate. And I would also do the same thing for architecture and houses and props. You know, if I need an interior scene, I would try to find as many kind of interior scenes from that era, and then you know, look at what kind of things they had on the tables or on the background or pictures on the walls, rugs, and then, you know, kind of get a general idea and then kind of based off of that, draw the scenes that that character would live in. In the next video, we are going to start talking about shape language for storytelling. 6. General Shape Language: So in the previous video, we kind of started hashing out what the character were like, and, you know, maybe starting to getting some gut reactions of what they might be wearing and how they might look. And when you're thinking about this, it's also kind of good to think about the basic shapes that you're going to be using to design the character and the silhouette of them, and then how that kind of plays into your storytelling. And as a caveat, I kind of see these characterizations used a lot of animation and a little bit less in books. But as a general education for learning about character design, I think it's good to be aware of these general principles. And so in general. So thinking about square. So a lot of times, if we have kind of square shapes, those shapes are often associated with traits like being proper or kind of a grounded person, reliable or rigid, a lot of times men are, you know, kind of shown in as a kind of square or squared up rectangular shapes. And then we have rounded shapes. Then we have rounded shapes, and those are oftentimes associated with being kind of soft or sweet, Happy, friendly, welcome and, you know, kind of, you know, a lot of positive, happy, pleasant kind of traits. A lot of kind of triangle and pointed shapes are often associated with either kind of sharp, you know, cunning, kind of wit kind of characters or characters who can have wit, or they could be evil. A lot of times, you know, I books, we don't get villains, but in a lot of, you know, animation and cartoons, we have villains, and those characters have a lot of kind of, you know, pointy shapes in them. But I can think of some fair tale retellings, like the big bad Wolf in like Ninja, Red Riding Hood, where we get a lot of these kinds of very sharp. Pointy shapes are also in, like, no David. If we think look at his teeth, his teeth are, you know, triangle, kind of, like shark teeth giving him that edge. Or another kind of general shape that I see a lot is this per pair or kind of a drop shape. In general, it's just kind of skinny on the top and kind of thicker on the bottom. And a lot of times I see those as being kind of slow. A lot of times, especially with this pair shape, they're feminine. They might be kind of slouchy or lazy characters. One example is this grandma character from the book by Leo Espinoza, or the dad character from the storm whale. And so another shape I see a lot is also this kind of a top heavy shape, and a lot of times that's, you know, you think about kind of big shoulders. A lot of times those characters are male, they're sporty, or it can also be somebody who's kind of menacing and looming. It kind of depends what you are, combining it with. So, you know, we might have somebody over here like this, or then we might have you know, it just depends kind of how you shape that character. So these are kind of the general shapes that I think about. And so as you're thinking about your characters that we are working on for this book, you can think about, you know, if those character characters embody any of those shapes. So maybe like the grandpa can be more of a squared shape, or maybe he can be well, I don't know if he's going to be lazy or you know, if he's going to be more masculine, you know, what kind of shape he might be. And then for the girl, if if she's kind of spunky and, you know, kind of electric, then maybe she's going to have a little bit sharper shapes. Um, and so you can think about those kinds of things and see if there's some of that shape language that you can apply when you're designing these characters. But like I said, I see a lot of this a lot more in animation and kind of game character design, then I see it in picture book design. I feel like for picture books, we usually just want to have cute characters, and a lot of times, the characters are very rounded, and there's a lot less of this kind of positioning with the shapes of the character and how they line up. For example, if you compare it to this character lineup from A. And in the next video, I created a fun little exercise that we're going to do together that will just kind of help you play with shapes and help you combine things in different ways to hopefully, you know, kind of loosen up your brain and help you come up with some interesting things for the future. 7. Character Exercise 1: A little warm up exercise. In general, when I'm working on sketching characters, I divide the bodies up into three sections ahead, a torso and the legs. And then by changing the proportions of the three sections, you can change your character. And you can spend some time exploring shapes and proportions this way and see how they change the feel and look of your character. In general, I end up kind of liking my human characters fairly proportionate and natural looking. But it's also fun to push things a little bit and find new angles of looking at things. I also divide the face up into three general sections, and so I put the eyes on the top cross hairs, and then the nose goes in that area in between, and then the mouth goes on the bottom line in the middle. And you can change the way that you draw this grid and that will also change the way that your face looks. This was exercise one, and we'll look at exercise two in the next video. 8. Character Exercise 2 (Gameify it): So I created this fun exercise so that you can kind of explore shapes and loosen up with your character designs. And all you really need is you need some sort of a pencil or a pen and a paper clip, and then a piece of paper. And I've kind of made this game ready for you, but you don't even need to print it out. You could also just draw a circle, divide it up with lines, and then draw different shapes in each one. And so the way that you play it is you put your paper clip in the middle, and then you spin it. It's like a spinner. And then you see where it lands. And so I have a teardrop shape. And so if you want to work on faces or bodies, it kind of depends. So if I want to work on faces first, I'm going to spin first. And so I got a pair shape. So I'm going to draw or a drop shape. And so I'm going to draw a drop shape. And then I will divide it up. And so with this one, you can divide it up in different ways. So I can And I'm just drawing kind of lightly to begin with. And so you can divide it up in different ways. I can have my things really close together. I can have them far apart. You know, you can change your grid structure however you want, and it's going to be a different looking character. And so over here, so let's draw some yes. So I usually draw my eyes kind of where the top lines meet. And if you want to make this more challenging, you can spin two times, and so I could spin a second time. Let's do something else. There we go. So it looks like a triangle. And then I would incorporate my triangle into this character design. So let's say, so I could have either a triangle little mouth or I could have a triangle. Nose would obviously be very obvious. And so let's go so we can go with a triangular nose. My eyes look a little lop sided, but that's all right. Then my mouth could go over here. Maybe this character has some sort of a qui fee. That kind of goes up. Oh, it could be I see like a man, and he's got this kind of this kind of like swoopy hair. I don't know. He looks like kind of like maybe we'll give him some kind of iris. Once he start drawing, everything kind and so he's kind of chubby, maybe. I don't know, maybe he's now he's starting to look more like a woman. And here's kind of one character, and then we'll draw another one over here. So maybe we'll do bigger eyes. And then maybe he's got a triangle nose to, so let's do the same for both. This could be a hat. Maybe he's a nome. Maybe he's got kind big cute ears. Give him some red. Well, it's not red, but give him some rosy cheeks. All right. So then we have a cute little known character. With the same shapes that we spun, we could come up with different characters. Then if we're using bodies. What I usually try to do is I start out with some sort of a rectangle. You can divide it up into threes so you can come up with maybe this one has really long legs. We'll do a second one here. Each one can be different. You can do one at a time or two at a time, and then let's say there's a big let's say they've got short legs, and then we'll spin again. All right. I got a circle. And now I need to incorporate a circle somewhere. Most likely my head's going to be a circle, but maybe our body is going to be circular too. Then let's do something else for the other one. I got a tear drop shape again. Let's do tear drop body for this guy. You can make it harder or easier depending on how many times you spin. Let's say I'm going to this in there and then let's say I'm going to do it one more time. And I got a circle. I'm going to add these two shapes in there too. So let's have some fun. All right. So we have a really long legged boy who showed up over here. He's probably maybe not the best one. All right, let's see. So I have a tear tear shape over here. Let's see. Imagine this character has red hair for whatever reason. All right. So this is my second character. And so, you know, first character maybe not that successful. This character I would have never come up with the character design like this on my own. So, you know, it's just a fun way to explore. And like I said, I might not be using these as something in this particular book, but it just gives me ideas of when I'm working on a future book or if I'm just looking for a fun character to draw for a portfolio, maybe, you know, one of these characters might be something fun that I might use as a kind of a basis on working on a character. Going forwards. And so hopefully this will be kind of a fun game for you. And if you can post some of your character sketches in the project section of our gallery, and that way, everybody can kind of enjoy what people came up with. And in the next video, we are going to talk about body part library. 9. Body Part Library: Character parts library. I often have a general idea of what I want my character to look like, but especially in the beginning, I needed a little bit of extra help to get myself going. And so visiting the library and bookstores, as you may have noticed, is my number one way of solving a problem. So for character design, what I've done is I've kind of created this kind of mental library of body parts. And so I've looked at a lot of books, and I've made sketches to kind of keep track of things. But by now, everything is kind of in my brain, and so I have this kind of library of, you know, what an eye could look like or what a leg or an arm could look like or what hands look like. And then when I'm working on a character sketch, I kind of borrow things from that library and I try different things out. And so I'll have like a face of a child, and then I'll try dot eyes, and then I'll copy and paste, and then I'll make another one, and then I'll try circles or I might try big eyes, little eyes, oval shaped eyes, just kind of different things, and different mouths, noses, you know, you get the point. And then I kind of have everything laid out on the same sheet. And then from there, I kind of look and see and feel which character feels like the right way to draw this character for the book. And then secondly, when you start drawing that character, you'll also notice that you kind of default to certain ways of drawing. You know, you're comfortable drawing a certain specific way and things like for myself, I don't really like oval eyes. And for me, they always look a little bit off or these seed shape eyes. For myself, I usually like either dot eyes or then circle eye with the pupil in it. Those are the two types of eyes that I use in My character designs, but once you start looking, it's interesting to see all the different ways that you can draw an eye or like I said, ear or whichever body part. So I've gone through some of the books that I have, and I've created this library of characters or a character, you know, sheet for you. So I've gone through my books and taken some photos of different characters to make this character sheet for you. Most of them, I'm trying to kind of make them around the same age. So most of these characters look like they're somewhere between, I don't know, eight to 5-years-old or something like that. And so you can see in this top corner right here, we have characters that look very, you know, like they have a photo not photo realistic, but they definitely look like they've been referenced from photos. It's very realistically painted. And then over here, you can see on these two characters on the top corner. You can see that they have, you know, calves and knees, and, you know, they've been rendered really nicely, and then, you know, these other three are a little bit more simplified, but, you know, still getting a lot of details in them. And then I had kind of these two groups over here. And you can see in the top one, everybody kind of has outlines to them, except for maybe this one right here by Mali Idol And you'll see it starts getting a little bit more simplified. Mostly, everybody pretty much has a round head, except for there's maybe a little bit more stylization right here for this little guy from Peter Reynolds. And then in the corner, you can see that things are starting to be a little bit more stylized. For example, these characters from Ben D Davies. In these illustrations, they don't even have mouths. Most of them have dot eyes, you know, maybe a little bit less expressive eyes. There's a lot more areas of kind of flat color. There's not a lot of shading going on in some of these. Some of these just have like texture on here. And so you can see how it starts getting a little bit simplified. And then we have this set of characters that are even kind of more stylized from, you know, the ones that we saw before where, you know, over here, we have these really nice outlines, but, you know, there's no outlines for the hair. It's just all kind of indicated with color. And with this in a lot of Oliver Jeffers characters, his legs are just little sticks. He doesn't even have feet at the end of them. Which is kind of a fun way. And just so you know, all the books that I've taken these kind of character shots from, they're going to be listed in the resources section, so you can find all these characters and all the books for you to look at later. And if you look at, you know, the character from Wolf and the snow by Matthew Codell, his character is just a red triangle basically with, you know, some arms and legs coming out of it and then a circle where the coat, you know, where the face is showing from the coat. And so, you know, some characters have thick legs, some characters have skinny legs. And then I have one more set over here, which I kind of felt this was kind of the style when I look at it, and I'm thinking that this illustrator has a background in animation. A lot of times or something they've done with movies or they have a degree or they've worked for a studio like that. And a lot of times you'll notice that you know, they're just rendered people who work in animation. Usually, the characters are just rendered a little bit differently. But but you can see, there's a lot more details. There's a lot more kind of shape. Remember when I was talking about that shape language, the way you know, everything is kind of built, it's built with kind of more definitive shapes, and there's usually kind of very dramatic lighting in them, and their characters. I don't want to say they don't look the same, but for me, there's always kind of a look where I can tell that, you know, that person has also, you know, maybe illustrated for Disney or Pixar. And so when we're looking at all these pieces together, you can just see and, you know, this isn't even the range. There's much more sketchier style if you look at Matthew Cordel's work. He has a lot of kind of sketchy lines, line work in his work. And so this isn't even the full range of picture book styles out there, but it just gives you an idea that you can draw characters for picture books in all these different ways. And when I'm developing characters, when I was talking about the library, you can look over here at the way legs are drawn, or hands are drawn or eyes or noses or whatever it may be, and you kind of figure out what you're comfortable with and what fits the story that you're trying to illustrate. So when you're working on different books, just picking one style of eyes for this book doesn't mean that you always have to draw that shape of eyes. You can change eyes for different picture books or the way that you draw different things. But in general, as a kind of a guideline for myself, I try to keep it consistent when I'm working within a book project. So if I'm creating multiple characters for a book, I try to draw all the eyes the same way. The legs, you know, it's not as big of a deal, but kind of facial features, I try to make sure that you know, these characters look like they belong into the same project to just make everything look more cohesive. All right. So now that you kind of have an idea of what this body parts library that I was talking about is all about. Now, let's get to actually sketching our characters. 10. Building With Basic Shapes: Starting with general shapes. So as you start sketching and working on your character, I usually try to when I'm just sketching them, I usually try to reduce them to basic shapes that are easy to draw. So boxes, cones, tubes, spheres, you know, kind of bean shapes. And it's easier for me to pose those and turn them in space and imagine how they would be seen from, you know, kind of different angles. And as I am revising my sketches, then I start adding more details to them. In general, for picture books that range from ages three to eight, we're looking for acute and relatable characters. And in most cases, the main character in this age range is also a young character close to the age of the reader. And I found that in general, the younger the book is meant for, the less detail is needed. And as you illustrate for older audiences, the style usually ends up being more complicated with more realistic proportions and details. But those are just like I said, general guidelines, and there's always going to be exceptions and people drawing in their own styles. And so if we look at these characters that I placed on the character sheet earlier, you can see that, all the characters are really cute. They have different personalities. They are engaging and we want to know what st what stories they're going to tell. And so no matter how you draw or what your style is, it can be a variety of different things from sketchy to very realistic. The main idea is usually to have appealing characters that are cute. Just another note, if you're working on a little picture book character over here, and then you're working on an adult character over here and they have longer legs, my general advice would be, don't give your child character a head that is much larger than the heads that you're drawing for your adult characters because if you imagine this child growing up, they're just going to have a ginormous head compared to the adult. We if I have a book that has both kids and adults in it, and they're interacting. I always make sure that whatever head I design for my children's character is going to be no bigger than whatever head that I draw for my adult character. Or just a little something to be mindful about and check yourself on when you're designing. So I wanted to add another side note about relatability. And we have kind of the two different extremes of representation over here. So we have basically kind of a stick figure over here, the crossing the street sign, which is like the universal symbol for man. You know, we don't know the age, we don't know anything. It could be man woman, it's just a person. And then on the other hand, we have a photograph that is very specific. You know, this is a specific person, you know, who exists in time. And so then we have everything in between. And so when we think about relatability, when we're at this extreme over here, he's relatable to everybody, when we're at this extreme over here, it's a very specific person. And so you can also think about that when you are designing your characters. And once we start moving from this end down this way, you obviously, you know, I put a second piece over here, and now we have distinction, you know, we have man and a woman, and then it would kind of keep going from there. And then we have this whole, you know, this would be kind of simple. And then we would get all the way more complicated to some of the pieces over here that are drawn from photo references. And so when you're thinking about your character and thinking about your story, you know, some stories, it's a very specific character that has very specific traits in some stories. It's a more general character, where it's maybe more of a plot driven story where we're concentrating on sounds or sites or some other senses where it's not as specific to have a specific character. And so when you are thinking about the details that you're adding to your character, think about where your character would fall on this line between a very general character and a very complicated, individualized character. All right. So I just brought up my characters of Masi and tweed, just to kind of show how these characters are shaped. And I know I talked a little bit about this in my other class, and we'll talk about this in part two of this class two. But if you look at the way the characters are kind of shaped, they are made with simple shapes that it's easy for me to turn them in space and move them around. And so you know, if we're looking at Masi over here, we can tell that he's made with an oval, and then his hat is, just kind of a circle on top of that, that's just slightly bigger than his head. His ears are half a circle or kind of letter Cs. His body is kind of I think of it that his body is kind of a square where the top is a little skinnier than the bottom. So I don't even have to have specific names for the the shapes, but in my mind, that's how I think about it, and then his arms are just tubes in my mind, they bend at the elbows, and then wherever the elbow is in the middle, that's where he has got these little marks. Then their legs are two little sticks, and their boots are basically square with a little triangle for the tip. And then there's designs and other things. Then the way that I was thinking about his nose was I was basically thinking about it in space where it was kind of kind of a triangle, but it's a little bit concave. And then if you look at it from the bottom, you know, it would be kind of like that. And then if you look at it from the side, it would kind of be like that where it would be convex or concave. I can't remember. But anyways, it would be going kind of down from there. Depending which way I was drawing it or from what direction I was looking at it, I would know, which way to add it onto the face and their eyes are ovals with ovals inside and the mouths are just mouths are just a half a circle. Then as far as hands, hands are usually a little bit more complicated. But most of the time, the way that I think of hands is, if this is where the wrist comes, I think of hands as it's kind of like a square that's a little bit bigger on the top then on the bottom, and then the thumb comes out from there, and then there's fingers when I think about the fingers, I usually think that the pinky fingers, the shortest one, and then that would be the way that I would draw. Then a lot of times I would just end up you know, making it a little bit simpler like that. A lot of times if I'm having a hard time, drawing a hand, grabbing something or however it may be, I'll either take a reference photo of it, or I'll ask somebody to pose for me or I'll look for photos online where people are doing an activity similar to what I'm doing, or what I need my character to do and then I'll look at the way that their hands are posed in the air like if they're jumping, how are their hands in space when somebody's jumping or running. And then I kind of take note of that and then draw my hands based on reference photos. Really quickly, just to show this is cat from my series, Kitty and at. So the way that I draw cat in Kitty and cat, I have a very kind of specific way of drawing. So cat's face is hexagon with two triangles on the top. You know, they can be angled different ways. And then there is kind of the nuzzle or muzzle is kind of a oval shape. The the nose is a heart shape, and then there's a circle around this side. And then depending, you know what kind of an expression. But in general, I have two lines with half a circle is underneath and that's cat with eyebrows. Then as far as his body goes, it's kind of a beam shape or in a little bit like a rectangle. And then a little bit softened tail on it. And then if you look at the legs, the legs are pretty much just triangles. It's a little bit of a longer haired cat. And then with little sticks coming out of them, and then the paws are at the end of the stick. In very, very simple terms, this is basically the way that I drew cat and then just depending on how how he or she is laying, you know, I would just kind of round those things up. And so with this part for the back leg, it would be kind of, you know, if it curls its leg in, then I would round this triangle up. But those are kind of like the basic shapes that I used to draw cat for Kitty and cat. In the next video, we'll go over some common mistakes that I see a lot of beginning illustrators make with their character designs. 11. Fix Common Mistakes, pt 1: Okay, some common mistakes. The main guideline I feel like for picture book characters is that you want your characters to be appealing and reflect the spirit of the story that you're illustrating. Sometimes you might get feedback that your characters could be more appealing, but if you have a hard time seeing where your illustrations fall short, if it's possible to ask the person who critiqued if they can be more specific with their feedback. Like, is it facial features or the way that things are drawn? But here are some of the common pitfalls that I see when looking at portfolios. The first thing is if your character is anatomically balanced for the age that you're portraying. Main characters for books are most often young and when drawing children or young creatures, we usually want round heads with eyes sit under the middle line, so there's a big area for the forehead. The nose and mouth go in the space under the eyes, and then the ears on the sides. As we were talking about the mental library for body parts, you can change the way that you draw everything defined what you're comfortable with. You want to keep the details in the face to minimum. The more you add details, the older or odd the character will end up looking. And so a lot of times with younger characters, if you think about the middle line of their head. For younger characters, the eyes are usually kind of below the middle of the head, and then the nose is, you know, pretty close to the eyes, and then the mouth is somewhere in between the nose and the chin. But as your character grows, kind of everything grows down. So these the distance from the eyes to the nose, it becomes bigger. Usually this space stays about the same, but this space gets bigger. And also the way that the head grows, the eyes end up being more closer to the middle. For an older character. If we age of this character up, I'd move the nose lower and then I'd keep about the same distance over there. And so then this could be a version of the character as they've aged up a little bit in life. And I'm trying to keep the eyebrows kind of about the same. And so now this immediately with having a little bit longer distance between here, it immediately starts looking like an older character. And that's how I usually age characters up, and then once they become teenagers, this movement stops a lot of times older, people will have kind of bigger ears. And then if they start being the grandpa age, then once we add lines to places, then that will age the character up. And that's how I in general age my characters when I work on them. Then if we look at whole bodies, and if I'm looking at whole bodies in general, what I do is for younger characters, my head is about the same as the torso, which is a lot of times either the same or even shorter. Sh sh than the leg. This would be kind of a young character. As far as arms go in general, if you think about where the belly button is, belly button is about the middle of the torso, that's where the elbow goes and then the rest of my arm, they go a little bit past the hips. And this is where you know, this is kind of where I would draw my arms. He's looking kind of funky. Then when I start aging my character up, as you probably have heard, then you end up having you can have the same size head, but then torso ends up being longer. And then by playing with relationships of how long your torso and legs are, that's kind of how I play with my character and I feel like a lot of times if it's a teenager character, their torsoes are still long, but I feel like they're always gangly. I would in general, for teenagers or teens, I would draw longer arms and legs and a shorter torso, and then once you get to a grown up, then they're a little bit more proportionate with the way that everything is shaped. Those would be my general guidelines for getting your characters in proportions. There are lots of guides on the technical aspects of the amount of, you know, how many heads go into a body. But I feel like in picture books in general, a lot of times I feel like the heads are a little bit bigger than if it was a photograph of a person. And so I don't always go with, you know, it's a specific amount of heads per the height. I go also by clothing and just the way when I draw the character, how it looks. And so as an example, I just wanted to show you this grandpa character from a book that I just recently finished. And as you can tell, the head put another layer. So the head is, let's see one, two, three, there's about four, just about under four for that, and then I've done you know about 2.5 for the legs or Maybe if I start the hips, maybe it's about 3.5 for the torso and 3.5 for the legs. The head is definitely bigger than what it would be in real life, and the head for the boy is about this size. The head for the grandpa and the head for the boy they're close to the same size, and then if we jaw kind of the torso. Of the boy here, then the boy would be kind of he's wearing kind of an oversized sweater from his grandpa. And this is where H Belly button would be. That's basically kind of how I have when I start drawing my character sketches, I always kind of draw an armature underneath, my clothing, just so I kind of know how big and how big my characters are, in relation and make sure I draw in the same way for every page, and then it's easy for me to kind of follow the same thing over and over again. In part two, for this class, we will also talk about character consistency and how to draw your characters consistently through a whole picture book. So that's my general thoughts on character design. And then the next video, let's look at how to correct some styling issues with characters and what to do if somebody tells you that your color palette is off or your characters look dated. 12. Fix Common Mistakes, pt 2: So the second point is, how detailed is your character? And so if there's a lot of kind of lumps and bumps in the body, it becomes kind of very confusing. And it also doesn't really help. Your character ends up looking kind of muscular rather than kind of soft like a child. The general guidelines are, if you're drawing arms or legs, instead of drawing two lines and making kind of a bubble, I would recommend making one if you want to draw more natural characters, drawing one line straight and then drawing another one. And then oftentimes it would go the other way on the other side of the body. And if we want to take this character and simplify it and make it look, the first thing that I would do is I would work on giving it more of a rounded head. And simplifying I'm going to add my nose to the top over there, add my mouth over there, add acute little ear. We can still keep the same eye size if we want. And then as far as the hair goes instead of adding a ton of instead of adding a ton of detail into your hair, it's a good idea just to think about hair as more of a shape. In general, and you can add some general kind of lines in it if you want. Instead of drawing each strand for the hair, it usually looks a little bit nicer if we simplify a little bit, and then you can add some lines in there if you want. Then for same thing goes with the clothing. I'm going to eliminate just some of these. Maybe there's going to be two little lines actually, I don't like Just going to If you think about the way that if it's pushed if she's running this way, if it's pushed against her body, then this side would actually be straight. And if I wanted to add maybe a bubble. I she's she's going this way, her fabric is kind of coming this way, then maybe I'd add one line over there. But in general, I don't add any a lot of lines inside of the clothing either. Maybe just one or two, I'm going to instead of giving her all these lumps and bumps over here, we'll kind of simplify these shapes. And then with the lines that I'm putting inside of here, that's kind of what I'm indicating which leg is forwards and which leg is back. And then I'm going to simplify my leg shape. Then four feet, I usually think of them as triangles. Then if I want to add a little a little toe in there, I usually do. For children, a lot of times when you think about adults, we'll have there might be a little bit more of a wrist, but when you actually look at children, their legs and like ankles and wrists it's all kind of the same size. And so that's also one way that you can differentiate between adults and children. And so I'll add a little bit of a crew there. But as far as her, a lot of times, people will draw even children's hands really big and with long skinny fingers, and so I'm going to keep the hands small. There we go. Then if I delete some of my catchy. So you want to keep fingers kind of short and chubby. A lot of times I'll go back and, you know, hands are really important. And so a lot of times I'll make sure my hands look nice, my lines, and so there we go. And that would just be a little bit more aesthetically pleasing looking character where everything is just a little bit more simplified compared to what we started with. Some other feedback you might be getting from your work is that your characters might look dated. And the biggest thing, if you've gotten the feedback that your characters look dated. What I would do is look at a bunch of picture books that are being published today. And then you can, you know, paste them on a sheet like this and then and then make comparisons compared to your own book. And just for this example, I only took covers of books, but if you're doing a comparison for yourself, you might want to actually look on the insides of books to get the characters in action. But I wanted to cover so that you can actually see which books I'm talking about. And so if somebody's told you that your books, your characters are looking dated, I think a lot of times what that refers to is to this kind of illustration style where you have black outlines, and then a lot of times it's been kind of water colored. You know, in the 80s and the 90s, they didn't really have digital art yet. And so a lot of these were, you know, they were hand drawn, hand inked, and then they were water colored on the top. And so I feel like that's oftentimes when you hear something being looking dated, that's kind of the style that they're referring to. And secondly, the other thing might be that you might get feedback about your color palette. If you look at a lot of these color palettes for some of the older books, a lot of them also have par have very primary colors or a lot of the colors of the rainbow. When I look at newer books and compare that with them, I feel like newer books a lot of times have a little bit more sophisticated color palettes. For example, if we look at this piece over here, everything is we've got a really bright primary yellow, primary blue, pink, everything is kind of fighting against each other on this cover, whereas in over here, it's more softer colors, more broken colors and we have. It just seems to flow and go together a lot well. So to summarize, if you're getting the feedback that there is something kind of going on with either your characters looking to dated or your color palette, your color palette just doesn't look right. Then what I would do is look at, be aware of current books, current trends, what is being published today, go to the bookstore, go to the library and look at books published in the last three years and really pay attention to color palettes and really pay attention to character design. And and kind of what makes those characters tick and what makes them interesting. And if you wanted to, let's say I let's say I'm working from here and Let's say I love the color palette over here. What I could do since I'm working digital, I could even just pick colors from here and see how the A lot of times, I'll try to put similar colors together. Maybe I'll pick a few of the greens. Let's see, I'll pick a lighter green maybe. Then there's greens up here. We got some yellows. Then there's some reds, oranges, broken. Nothing's really a primary color. All these colors they're the grass, but if I compare it to what I'm getting from, Over here, you can just see the stark difference between I guess I could put it over here, just between the colors and how much there's a lot more fighting going on between the colors over here than what this more harmonious color palette. Then we have some of these purples over here. Obviously, this illustrator has used a lot of different colors in their illustration, but everything is a muted broken down color rather than something that's straight off. Straight up primary colors. Maybe there's some even some browns in here. I'll delete these. This is just a nice color palette you could do the same over here and if you look at Vashti Harrison's, cover, we've got just pink for the girl and then gray and even her leggings are bluish gray, so it goes well with dad over there. And so looking at everything. Everything just goes together pretty nicely. And so I just wanted to give that as some ideas because it's really hard to say, Oh, it's just this one thing or it's just that other thing. It's more kind of like the feeling. You know, it's hard to put your finger on it. It's just kind of the feeling you get when you look at these older older books and the way that they look. And so just making a comparison and looking at, you know, like over here, you have a lot of details, and everybody's kind of in a very stiff pose over here. I just there's a difference between what was published, you know, ten, 20 years ago, compared to what is being published right now. And then a second tip is if you are also in a critique group, that is great because that way you can get feedback for your work from your peers who are kind of at the same level for you. And if you have a chance to get a paid critique from an industry professional, either agents or art directors, but also asking current working illustrators if they are open to giving critiques, you can offer to pay for them, and a lot of illustrators might be up for that. Just giving you some feedback on how to improve your work. That is one avenue to go as well. All right. So now that we've looked at some common kind of missteps, let's start sketching our characters in the next dia. 13. Sketching Grandpa Character: L et's start sketching our characters for the Giant Turnip. So I know that there was going to be the grandpa character, and I wanted to work on him. And so I might, you know, do some exploration, just kind of basic shapes and try to think of how I want him to feel like. And so I usually just kind of start with kind of basic shapes. So this is kind of like a bowling pin. I was thinking debating between overalls or suspenders? I was thinking my grandpa used to wear suspenders a lot? He wasn't a farmer, but he used to wear suspenders a lot. I was thinking maybe instead of doing the o obvious overalls overalls, maybe my character is going to be wearing. Maybe he's going to be wearing suspenders. I'm also trying to think what is this is side view? How do I want my character to look? I oftentimes feel like older characters they end up having a little bit more hunched. Their head isn't on top of their head anymore. I feel like it's oftentimes it's like in the front. I don't know if I like that profile. But right now, this is still from the side. I don't know if I want to wear some a hat. He needs to be pulling. He needs to have legs long enough that I can I need to be able to make him look like he's pulling on something. Or he could be really lanky, like a goofy type of a character, but I don't know if I feel like I like him more chunky like this. Maybe I'm just looking at all these and thinking. Maybe I'm going to go with something shaped like this. He's going to have suspenders. He needs to have some shoulders. If you're feeling stuck, you could also just look up farmer on Google and see how you feel. You can also start drawing your characters in different poses just to feel like how a lot of times I have issues with drawing hats. I oftentimes look up pictures of hats online or people wearing hats so I can get the rim positioned. I think a lot of farmers wear plaid shirts. I still kind of see how it hits differently. Over here, I have it and I like this where it's a little bit higher maybe. Then I need to figure out the head. Yeah, well. He's got a little bit more of a square head, I think. I could draw this multiple different times or over here, I'm just testing. I got big bushy eyebrows. I still feel like I don't I don't like the eyes. I'm just going to test out some different eyes over here and see which kind of eyes. Which eyes I like. They could be val this way in of I'm debating between these two ones. I think maybe I'm going to go with dot eyes and let's see. I'm going to go with dot eyes, and then I could take this guy. This just makes it a little bit easier for me to play with. Now when I bring this head over here, I can figure out what where it is. S. I feel like my character is a bit crooked over here. If you need to just move them, going to move his shoulders over just a little bit. Where where is his head going to land on his shoulders? Because he's a bit older, I feel like his head's going to land lower on his shoulders. Maybe like over here. Is that the same right size, maybe the head needs to be smaller. There we go. I'm just going to explore some other facial features while I'm at it. I think he just doesn't have the same spunk. I'm wondering things up a little bit. Give them a little bit more of a longer face. Longer nose. Then since he's older, maybe his eyebrows need to be a little bit lower. Since older people have droopy eyes. That could be something too, maybe it could still move it. I think maybe his eyes need to come down to. This is oftentimes how I play with my characters and see what I can come up with and just spend some time moving with them. Wondering if the rounder face would work better because he's got the rounded body. Needs a bit more work. So let's see. I need to make some more room over here. So after kind of figuring out this guy at first, I thought I was going to give him a farmer hat, but I just wasn't feeling it. So then I thought kind of like an old person hat would look better. And so what I do is I copied and pasted this onto a different layer. And then I ended up working on it a bit. I, you know, put his feet a b apart. And so he ends up having a little bit more of a He ends up having a little bit more of a square shape when his legs are apart. And then if I kind of, you know, I drew horizontal lines across just to get everything kind of figured out. And so this would be what he looks like from the side. So I'm pretty happy with that as my main character for the grandpa. I figured he's going to wear a plaid shirt. I don't know. Maybe his shirt I still kind of like this being up high over here, so maybe I might try to hike hike this up, and I could even try that with the liquefy tool. So I don't know if that's better or worse. So what we could do is, this is before. This is after, which one do I like better? Maybe for now, I'm going to keep him like this and maybe once I start sketching him in different poses, I might change it up a little bit. Usually, I get my basic character sketch down, and then once I start putting them in different poses, the design might end up changing just a little bit because I'm having to put them in poses and see what I'm comfortable drawing and how I want to kind of work on this character. And I think this is going to be my old man, and then I will turn that layer off. And then older characters for me are always harder to draw. And then if we start working on on the girl, I kind of had 14. Sketching Little Girl Character: And so for the girl, I had kind of an idea of, I wanted her to be a little bit spunky, and I was thinking about my own I have a 6-year-old daughter. And so I was thinking about her catching bugs, and I thought it might be a fun kind of a side plot on there that in the beginning, while the farmers planting and, you know, getting help from the grandma that maybe we'll have this little girl who's kind of running around the farm, and she's trying to catch, like, a butterfly or a bug or something like that. And so I think she'll end up having kind of, like a net. And so I'm thinking So I don't want her to be super juvenile, but I'll start kind of sketching her and feeling my way around. Doesn't have to be perfect. Maybe I'll have her once I start drawing her, I don't know if she'll be missing a tooth or something. And then I was thinking of doing kind of like a triangular body. I know my kids will wear rubber boots out everywhere, so maybe she's got a little bit of a side part. I just kind of feeling my way around over here and maybe She's got a little bit of long hair, not super long, but maybe something kind of like this. And then so she's going to have kind of skinny legs, but then she'll have rubber boots. I don't know if I want to draw. A lot of her boots seem to have handles on them, so I don't know if I'll draw. I'll see. We'll see. And then she'll have, my daughter loves wearing dresses, put little pockets on here. So I'm just, you know, working around and my first sketches, you know, they're a little sketchy, and then I'll usually I will usually try to copy this layer. And, you know, my first kind of poses are always kind of very plain just to kind of figure this character out. So maybe she's wearing this little tunic thing. So maybe like a pin four. I don't know. Could be something like that, too, maybe. Then a lot of times, what I'll do is I'll just duplicate this layer, bring it over, and then just draw on the top. I was thinking, I wanted her hair to be a little bit in front of her face, but we don't want it to be, so maybe to move my eyes a little bit further and I don't know, it could be, her nose could be could try different kinds of noses. I don't that. I don't know. My kid is missing one tooth. A lot of times I'll even draw the other eyebrow, even though it's behind the hair, a lot of times I'll kind of indicate it back behind over there. I want to make sure my her pinafore is going on her shoulders and not on her neck. I don't know, maybe she's wearing I don't know should she be wearing a T shirt? I don't know. Can be a long sleeve shirt for now. This is a fairly basic shape. If I imagine her body inside over here, I'm thinking it's probably going to be something and something like that. Her legs can't go all the way out. I don't know if it's going to be too tedious of a detail to be drawing these handles over here. We'll see when I start drawing her in her different poses. Then for boots, a lot of times I will kind of draw, you can do a flat, and then there's usually a little bit of a heel, and then a lot of times they'll come up. So if this leg goes all the way out to the side, it would be kind of something like that. It's coming all the way to the front, then I would just draw as kind of a rectangle with, with a little loop on the top and then handles go out from there. All right. So I'm thinking, then I can take this one out. And so that's looking kind of cute. Once we get our moving, then they'll liven up a little bit. And I just wanted to make a little note about clothing that you're going to be drawing. If whatever clothing you're going to be drawing if it has stripes or if it has, you know, let's say it's got I don't know, a flower over here or, you know, a funny or whatever maybe it's a cat tunic or something. Just be aware that whatever, you know, whatever details you think are cute and that you're putting into, you know, articles of clothing, it's going to have to be drawn, you know, kind of consistently through the whole thing, or, like, if you have stripes, you should, you know, kind of know how many stripes you have on the sweater or shirt or whatever. And then however you're posing your character and drawing them, you know, the shirt should kind of have about the same amount of stripes. In each pose that you know on each page of the book. And so if you're drawing a very elaborate design on somebody's shirt, just be aware of that then you're going to have to draw that every time you draw your character to keep it consistent. So that's why when you look at picture books, a lot of times characters will have very simple articles of clothing or their clothings, you know, it'll have stripes, or it'll have some sort of poka dots or basically something a design element that's just very easy to repeat from from one illustration to another. So keep that in mind when you're designing your character that you'll have to do that design on every character through the whole book and keep it consistent. In the next video, we'll talk about posing and line of action. 15. Line of Action: We spent a lot of time figuring out who our characters are, what their motivations are, and how they kind of feel to us. And so now it's time to get them moving and shaking. When looking at portfolios, directors want to see a lot of movement in them. They want to see the feelings of your character not only on the face, but also in the way that your character is moving their body, and the way that they're kind of acting out. So for example, you know, if your character is in love, You know, are they just like, like, is it just on their body? Are they coming forwards? What are their hands doing? What are their feet doing, or if they're sad or if they're bored? You know, I shouldn't just be a look on their face. Shoals you should be able to figure out what the emotion is also based on the way that they're moving their body. And so in book illustrations, whatever the feelings are and whatever the body movements are, you want to make sure that you're almost kind of exaggerating those a little bit sometimes so that you can really tell the story. When working on my characters, I oftentimes think about the story that the characters go with, and I try to imagine the poses that I might want to be drawing my characters in for the book. I usually have kind of a separate piece of paper or I use, just the canaas on my iPad, and I will draw the character in multiple different poses. A lot of times the poses will have a direction of the movement. So if they're running, they might be extending or if they're reaching, they're going up or however, They might feel. They might have a direction of the movement that a lot of times extends from the tip of their toes to either the hand, it goes up the spine into the neck or it can go up the arms to the tips of their fingers. That is called a line of action. Usually animators use that term, but you can also use it to describe the way the action goes in your illustrations too. If you Google the term line of action, you'll find lots of different k tutorials and lots of examples of how to of how illustrators use line of action to help them illustrate. And so when I was talking about that kind of exaggerated movement. So if you think about the line of action, if you're reaching for something, you know, if you're just a kind of normal person in real life, you're reaching for something, it might go one way, but then or go this way. But if you are illustrating it and you really want to show you know the line of action, somebody trying to reach something, you, you know, you might extend that a little bit further and almost stretch your character to try to make it really look like they're really trying to reach something high up or the same thing if they're, you know, you know, they're scared and they're recoiling. You know, you really want to, you know, bunch them up into a ball instead of just, you know, halfway kind of going for the motion. And so in that sense, the lines of actions are important, and a lot of times they kind of get exaggerated a little bit to give clearer kind of silhouettes of the actions that your characters are doing. So I've made a list of different feelings that you could illustrate for your character. And when you're illustrating these feelings, you can just make a sheet that just shows faces with these feelings, but then also practice some of these feelings in the way that with like a whole body sketch showing, how that character would either standing up or you could even have them just sitting on a chair and how that character would act out that feeling through their whole body showing it. When you're drawing specific poses, sometimes it can be hard to kind of draw your character in a specific pose. If I'm having a hard time, a lot of times, I'll act it out and see if I can figure it out for myself. If it's hard for me to kind of imagine them the pose just by me doing it, then I'll ask for somebody to act that scene out for me and I'll take a photo, or I might act out the scene myself and ask somebody to take photos of me doing it. And a lot of times instead of doing like, you know, holding a pose and then asking for somebody to take a picture, a lot of times I'll do the pose and then ask somebody to take kind of either a video of it or take multiple photos of me doing that pose or do the pose multiple times and then kind of get the sense of how the line of action goes and how I can best kind of tweak it and how to get the body to look natural. In the pose that I'm trying to draw. And then, especially for drawing facial kind of expressions, a lot of times I will use a mirror or the selfie setting on my camera, and I'll do the poses myself and kind of figure out, you know, if it's a angry fate, you know, I figure out how is faces squishing in or if it's a surprised face, if my face is going out, and then I'm making sure that I kind of exaggerate what whichever way my facial features are going when I'm doing an expression, then I try to exaggerate those a little bit. Or then sometimes if I'm just having a really hard time, then what I might do is just google, you know, the feeling like a board person or board man or board woman, and then I'll see kind of what kind of expressions come out. You know, what kind of come in the search results, and I might see if there's something helpful in there that I can use to help me with getting the expression just right. And lastly, what I wanted to emphasize is when you're drawing facial features, a lot of times, especially with eyebrows, there is we read faces so well. There is such a minimal changes in the way that eyebrows can move if they go in or out up or down that it can really change how your character is feeling, like how it looks like they're feeling. And a lot of times when I'm trying to get the character's face just right, it might take me sometimes, ten, 15, 20 tries, just drawing some eyebrows over and over and over again or eyebrow eye combinations over and over again just to get it right so that it's showing the exact emotion. If it doesn't seem right or feel like right in that first time when you draw it, just erase it or start a new sketch or however you feel like sketching the best and just keep working on the expressions until you get the right one. And really study study expressions. And so if you Google board or a board person and you just look at, like, what is the same? Same thing as what we did with when we were looking at those dwardan dresses for girls. Same thing. So if you look at, you know, 20 different faces that you find of people being bored, like, what's kind of the same thing and all of them, are the mouth drooping? Like how are the eyes, are the eyelids coming on top of the eyes, and then kind of find similarities and then see if you if those are some things that you can tweak on your face to get the expressions just right. In the next video, we'll talk about posing your character in recognizable sets. 16. Silhouette: So, when you're posing your character, whether it's for your picture book dummy or for just kind of practice sketches that you're doing or portfolio pieces, you want to make sure that you're posing them or kind of picking angles and poses that are easily recognizable. So we don't want your character to be kind of all jumbled up so that if we look at it just as a silhouette, that we cannot tell what your character is doing. So if we look at these silhouette right next to each other, we can now tell much easier what this character, what they are trying to do. And then I just made a third kind of segment to show even further, over here, we're not really seeing the other arms. So if I wanted to switch, which leg is going forwards and which leg is going backwards, then we're able to see all four limbs on this character. And then I thought, Well, you can also think, how else could you pose your character. Over here, I put the hands up to show that they're kind of coming down. And so now if we turn on all of our silhouette layers. Now it's even easier to see what the characters are doing. And so that's kind of the main idea of just creating recognizable silhouettes so that when somebody just glasses your work, they immediately know what your characters are doing. So in the next video, we'll talk a little bit about how to take the story into account to make your character stand out. 17. Background vs Character: So as you're working on your character poses and trying different things out, starting to add some color into it. Start thinking about details for your character that help identify it and separate it from its surroundings and from the other characters. What color of clothing does it need does your character need? Does it need more than one outfit? What color in the hair is going to be? Do they have accessories like earrings or hats or something else that they carry around that helps identify them? So, for example, in Masi and Tweed, they're identified not only by just the way that they look, their shapes, but they also wear you know, the same shirt through the whole kind of series. And then the other important thing is to make sure that your characters are sticking out from their environment. And so in Masi and Tweed, they wear, you know, a lot of a lot of the book happens in the woods, and a lot of it is mostly kind of greens and browns. And so in order for the characters to kind of stick out in the book, they both wear red hats and sweaters that are gray and this kind of a bluish gray color. And so these colors don't really come up anywhere else in the book, and then they also have red highlights in their shirts, and, you know, patterns that don't appear, you know, kind of these hard patterns that don't appear anywhere else on the book are like in the nature. And you'll notice when you start looking at details and picture books, a lot of illustrators will use red as a character color somewhere in their clothing to kind of pop them out, and then we'll talk about that in a minute. In a spoonful of frogs that's illustrated by Vera Brosko, you can tell that Her character is basically stands out from the background because she's kind of the darkest character, and also this character has, you know, the darkest, you know, clothing and the hat, and but she also has the lightest skin. So there's a big contrast in this character throughout compared to everything else where everything is a lot more kind of similar value so that this whole stove, even though it does have different kind of colors in it, it's all kind of visually, it looks like a big block. And so it's easy to see the character from the background in each scene. When she is kind of very high contrast, and she's the darkest kind of thing outline thing in the whole scene. So that's another way to think about to make your character stand out. And then, as I was saying, a red is another way of making your character stand out. And so in Farah loves mangoes, that's illustrated by Sarth Acina You'll see that Farah wears red. And and it's not a super duper bright red. She's also a triangle. She's got a lot of triangles in here, which kind of separates her from all these other organic shapes that are happening in the book. And so you can find her easily on the page because she also has high contrast with the hair, and then she's got the triangles and the red color, which helps you kind of pick her out in these kind of busy scenes. And then kind of another device that Ryan Higgins uses is that he oftentimes In a scene, for example, like over here, he will do the background in all kind of one color with different values. You know, kind of like a gray scale picture, but, you know, in a scales of kind of red. And then all the characters and things in the foreground are the colored And there's a couple of other, you know, the whole background of the house is all gray, and then just the colors or just the main characters are shown in color. So that's another way that you can make your characters pop out. And also, Penelope is, you know, very bright yellow and a pink, which, you know, has some contrast in it. So she's also pops out. You know, It's easy to see her on every page where she is. Nobody else kind of has that same color combination. And then my shape is Sam, which is illustrated by Lydia Nichols. If you look at this book, it's very easy to pick Sam out in each one of the pages. He's the brightest shade of yellow, and then everything else is much more kind of mute a tones in the book. So there is some yellow, but it's not as bright as the shape as Sam is in each page. So Sam is over here, the brightest one, and then everything else is kind of muted. And so this page doesn't even have yellow, except for where Sam is, and so he's easy to pick out in each one of those ones. And then in becoming a good creature that's illustrated by Rebecca Green. I wanted to share this one. So here's kind of our main character. And it's kind of it's based on a longer book for adults, and these are kind of snippets from there, like little chapters. And so the character is wearing different clothes in each one. But there are visual devices that Rebecca has used to kind of separate her and to draw our eyes into it. So over here, there's a lot of kind of framing devices. And then wherever our main character is, she's created kind of a calm area that doesn't have any patterns. And so she's framed our character really nicely over here so that we can see, high contrast where she is. Same thing over here. You know, it's a fairly simple image but we can see where our main character is and same thing over here. We have kind of this grouping of emus that are on one side, and they're all kind of the same value. They're kind of one grouping, and then we have a very light background with our main character in it. And same thing over here. She stands out because she's the only kind of blue that we have in the scene and also kind of a lot of detail in contrast around an area that does not have a lot of details in it. So then all her hair and all the little details of her face really kind of stand out over here. So I just wanted you to be aware of these things as you are thinking about your character and your character design. Think about the story that your character is going to be living in, what the background is going to be, and then kind of design your character and design your illustration so that we always know where your main characters are. Next video, I'll give you a real life example of a book that I've illustrated to show the process that I went through for designing the characters. 18. Example From a Book Project: So in this segment, I wanted to give you a short example from a recent book project that I just finished. The main manuscript for the book does not describe or have any dialogue for the characters. The two specific clues given for the characters were that there was a sweater and a hat and that there's two characters in the book. And other than that, there was you know, no pronouns or anything that would tell me the age or, you know, any other clues to who the characters were or what they were doing. The whole manuscript was more descriptive of the forest that the characters were walking in and the kind of sensations of, you know, touchy feely things that they, encounter over there. So it's crunchy leaves or a soft sweater or a cosy hat or squishy mud, or a rough turtle shell, you kind of get the idea. And so the whole book just talks about how the forest feels, and it doesn't really give us anything about the characters. And so when I discussed the project with my editor, the manuscript also had some very minor art notes of what the author had visualized for some of the scenes. And when I discussed it with my editor, They confirmed that they you know, want a grandpa and a grandson, and they were looking for the grandpa of being maybe a little bit younger and kind of outdoorsy. And based on what I had posted in my, you know, the pieces that I have in my portfolio online, they liked my more realistic style, instead of kind of my more stylized characters with, like, big eyes from from Kitty and at Mass and Tweed and some of the other books that I've done. And they asked also for the illustrations to be done in watercolor. And so I had some direction of what was going to be happening. Also, and then also I knew that the book was happening in the fall. And so there was some direction, but it was pretty general, and I was kind of free to do whatever I wanted with the characters. And so kind of what I started with was this is what I ended up sending to the publisher And I just started exploring and trying different things. And especially for the grandpa character, I was looking at examples from other books, and I looked up pictures online of, you know, grandpa characters or hiking people to look at, you know, ideas for clothing and different way I could characterize a grandpa. And then the same thing I did for the boy. You can see that I tried, you know, different kinds of noses, I tried different kinds of eyes. And actually, for the grandson, because the book was kind of general, I really wanted a more general look for the character. So I didn't even want the main character to be specifically a boy or a girl. I wanted it so the main character ended up. So here's kind of what what the publisher liked. So they liked these two kind of stylezations, and then they liked these ones. And so what I did was I, I just cut and pasted those into a document and then kind of started sketching my characters from there for the book and all the different poses. And so what I wanted was for the main character, the little boy or a girl to have kind of hair that could be either or. So it's not super descriptive. And I ended up, you know, we ended up doing dot eyes instead of really expressive eyes because, in general, dot eyes, are more general eyes than, you know, if you're doing trying to do an Asian eye or a Western eye or whatever. And so then I also picked dark hair color for them because I figured that's also going to be more general than having, you know, a blonde haired little kid. So I just wanted the characters to be more kind of general so that more people could kind of identify themselves in the story that they're going on or, you know, in this kind of exploration that is happening in the story. And then, kind of as a secondary story, because the book manuscript was all about the touchy feely things through the illustrations. I also added kind of a secondary wordless story about the relationship that has a relationship between the grandchild and the grandpa. And because I wanted people to, you know, fall in love with the characters, I also wanted the characters to kind of look cute, especially the little child in this book. And so there's a couple of scenes that are interior scenes in the book before the characters go out on the walk, where the main character is actually not wearing the sweater they're going to be wearing outside yet. And so for this outfit that I wanted them to wear, because I wanted it to be gender neutral, I also chose gender neutral colors for him. And so he's got a green shirt with green stripes, and so that way, you know, it can be their girls or a boy shirt, you know, we don't know. So in addition to wanting to have kind of gender neutral clothing, I also needed to take into account where the scenes were happening. So I knew that there were going to be a lot of scenes where there was going to be red or kind of yellow behind my main character. And usually, I'll use, you know, red or a bright yellow for my main characters to really pop them out. But because, you know, because of what the backgrounds were going to be, I knew that red and yellow probably wasn't going to work all that great. And then I also knew that there were going to be water scenes. So I figured blue might be a little bit hard too. So I was really I was really waffling, like what color it's going to be. And then as another consideration was that the main the little kid is going to also put on grandpa sweater. And if you think about, like, grandpa sweaters, you usually think that they're kind of gray or brown or they're usually not super patterned, and they're not really colorful. And they're usually pretty muted and simple. And so I did end up putting the Grandpa in this kind of a green and brown shirt. That was kind of Scandinavian inspired hand knit sweater with a little bit of a kind of a yolked pattern on it. And then for the main character, I figured it could be a blue, kind of a striped sweater. Like it's going to be oversized for him because, you know, he's technically wearing his grandpa sweater. And so it was a tough choice to figure out what color to make everybody. I figured with the Grandpa, he's going to stand I don't have a ton of green in the book, and so I figured green would kind of stand out with the brown and with the pattern in it. And then the blue in general was going to stand out. And also for the water scenes, I was trying to pop him out with just making him darker in value. And another way that I made them stand out was that I added detail to their sweater, so that they obviously had the pattern that wasn't anywhere else in the book. And then I added pencil marks on there, just to add a little bit of extra texture because I did add lines and texture, and there was a lot of kind of details going on in the rest of the book. And kind of one of the general general guides or kind of rules that I use when I illustrate is that my characters or my background should not have more details in it than my main characters. My main characters should have at least the same amount of detail as the backgrounds. And so if I'm spending time and drawing a lot of little, you know, little lines and making a lot of little marks in the background, I want to make sure that my characters I'm using the same amount of detail and time to really draw my characters. So adding some of those lines into my characters clothing really helped them kind of pop off the page and keep them separate and help you find them visually where they are on the page. In the next video, I have one last quick tip of just making sure when you're sketching your characters that you're drawing through to make sure that your characters are believable. 19. Anatomy Tip: Drawing through: Before we wrap up our class as you are undoubtedly starting to get ready to sketch, if you haven't already your characters, I wanted to make sure that I remind you about drawing through, making sure that your characters are kind of anatomically correct underneath their clothing. And so I don't know if you noticed. I realized after I had put this together that there's actually one of the characters in here who has a very questionable arm. And so if we look at this character right here in the way that she's built. If you actually look at, you know, this is her one arm, and she's holding on to her her baby brother. But then if you look at her other arm, body's somewhere over here, and then her legs, you know, connect to her hips over here. But the way that her other arm goes, it goes, it's a very, very long arm to be coming all the way around over here and connecting on the other side. And so it's not a super huge huge exaggeration, but it does, once you start looking at the anatomy and how things connect, m the way that it's coming it's coming kind of at a angle this way. And so it's kind of like a snake arm coming around. And so I wanted you to be just aware of that when you're drawing your ectors and putting them into different poses to always make sure that you're drawing through. And so drawing through would mean, you know, drawing your ector all the way through different, you know, wherever you're putting them to make sure that they're anatomically. So really her arm should only be about, you know, that size if it's the same as this one. And then the whole thing should be moved over. And so, you know, whether if your character is wearing a, you know, let's say she's wearing a ballerina, you know, a long dress or something, you want to make sure if this is, you know, and her legs are over here. You want to make sure you draw those feet underneath over here. So you don't end up with pinky toes over here and then like abnormally long leg over there or whatever it may be. So before you put cloths on your characters, just make sure you do those simple shapes first before putting or if there's things in front or whatever it may be so that, you know, then you can just erase things afterwards, but Making sure that you draw everything underneath properly will help you just make your characters believable and make sure that they end up not having any broken limbs as you go forward. And follow me along to the next video for some quick final thoughts. 20. Final Thoughts: Thanks for joining me in this class. I hope you've learned a ton and are excited to practice your new skills in character design. When creating characters for picture books, in general, you want your characters to look cute. So as a recap, when you want to create cute characters that are appealing for both art directors and readers alike, here are a few of the key points to remember. First, you want to have rounded shapes, and you want to simplify details, not too many lines in the hair or the face, and you know more rounded shapes. And second of all, you can keep hands and feet kind of small in general. Things are kind of tapered, and even arms and legs can be a little bit shorter compared to head size in a lot of the character designs. And then you should have a pleasing color palette to kind of pull everything together and have good storytelling with the actions and the poses and the expressions that you're showing on your character's face. When you keep those things in mind, you'll be able to create characters that are going to win hearts over. This class is part one of a series. In this class, we learn how to create our characters, and then how to get them moving around. Then in the next class that's going to be part two, I'm going to show you my best tricks on how to draw characters consistently when you have to draw a full bookworth of characters. And then in the third part for this class, I'm going to show you how I develop and draw animal characters. If you love this class, I hope that you would leave a quick review for it. It takes less than a minute if you even just want to leave stars. And I hope that you'll also be able to post your character designs into the project gallery. And if you have any questions about them, you can stick them in the discussion section. And then that way, I can answer any questions that you might have or if you want a kind of a feedback or a critique on your character designs. Or if you if you, did the fun game, if you wanted to post the goofy characters that you did for the game, if you don't feel comfortable posting your final character designs in the project gallery. If you post on social media on Instagram, I'm with the Tag Mirca Draws, and then everywhere else, I'm at Mica Hokan. If you can tag me, then I'm happy to repost and L and comment on what you've created. To see all the other classes that I've created, you can click on my name above. I've created several other picture book classes, or you can go to my website at mica.com. Thanks for joining my class. I can't wait to see what you create. I'll see you in the next one. Bye.