Character Design for Picture Books, Part 3: Animals

1. Introduction: You are interested in getting into picture book illustration, it's fairly important to know how to draw animals because animals appear in a lot of picture books. And so in this class, I'm going to teach you how to create animals that are cute and cuddly and that are interesting, that have emotions. And we also talk about how to create animals anthropomorphized animals where they walk on two feet and they might be wearing clothes. And I've learned a lot of tips and tricks over the years as an artist and an illustrator, and I'm going to be sharing those lessons learned with you in this class. And by the end of the class, you have created a series of animal sketches, and we are going to be working on kind of a simplified one, then one that has a little bit more details in it, and then one where we take the same character, and we put it on two feet and give it kind of human like characteristics. I'm Mirka, and I'm an author and an illustrator, and I worked with publishers big and small over the last five years to create several different kinds of books. I've done picture books and graphic novels and non fiction books. This class is number three in a series of three classes about character design for picture book. In the first class, we talk all about creating characters. We talk about how shapes affect characters. We talk about emotions, posing, and in the second class, we talk about how to draw your characters consistently. And then in this third class, we talk about how to create animal characters for picture books. While it's not required to watch the first two classes before jumping into this one, it will be helpful if you want to jump into those a little bit later or just skim through them to get the basic ideas for character design for picture books. Of the principles that I cover in those classes also apply for this third class for animal characters. Animals are my favorite thing to draw, and that's why I'm super excited about this class. I hope you're ready to jump in. Let's go. 2. Class Projects/Exercises: Thank you so much for joining me. I can't wait to jump into this class. If you've done the other parts, I know that you've learned so much about character creation already. And in this class, we're really going to dig in and do a lot of sketching for animals. I have some photo references that are going to be in the handout for this class, including all the important slides that I have. And you can download that before you start, and then that way, you'll have kind of everything ready. And I have the images digitally, so you can either print them out for yourself and use them to sketch on paper, or you can use them on your iPad or on your computer. You're also welcome to use any of your own photos of animals that you might want to create on your own. In this class, we're going to be doing several short exercises. We're going to start with using some photographs as reference and then figuring out the basic shapes that animals are made of. And then from there, we're going to sketch simple animal characters, and then from there, slightly more intricate animal characters. And then after that, we're going to take our animals and practice some emotions for them, and then we're going to also take our characters and practice giving them personalities, making them old or young, girl and boy, shy, extroverted, things like that. We will also practice drawing wings as hands. And then for the last exercise, we will be taking one of our animal characters, putting them up on two feet, and giving them human like characters. You can even add clothing if you'd like. I covered that in the class as well. And since we're working on several different exercises and doing a lot of different sketches, it should be super easy to pick something that you are proud of, or maybe there's something that you're stuck on and then post that into the class projects or the class comments. And you are welcome to if you get stuck, you're welcome to ask questions in the classroom comments section or in the discussion section. And whatever comments come in, I reply to everything. It might not be exactly on the same day, but within a day or two, I always check back in with skill share and answer questions that are coming up in the class. Also included resources and a handout section in this class. You can download it in the resources section, which is the button on the right side in the menu down below over here. I'm using Procreate on my iPad to do a lot of the sketching for this class, but you are welcome to use any either digital program or just pen and paper. Nothing that I'm doing in this class is going to be very complicated, so any media will work. All right. So let's get down to business and start working on our animal characters. 3. Comparative Animal Anatomy: So let's dive right into our class. Before we actually get into designing animal characters, what I wanted to do was take a quick moment and just go over kind of what I see as the parts of the animal and general animal anatomy. Most animals that, you know, have some sort of arms or wings or flippers and then legs, they have kind of the same they have the same bone structure and body parts, but a lot of it's just, you know, different um proportions, the way that their body is built. But knowing all the parts for the body and, like, you know, how an elbow bent, where the elbow is located, that really helps kind of drawing animals and making them believable. And so that's why I wanted to spend a little bit of time of that on that before we actually get to designing characters. So let's jump right in. Alright, so here I just have I've, you know, traced a skeleton of a horse. And when I think about any kind of an animal character, you know, even people, you know, anything that lives, I basically imagine there to be six parts to be designed and drawn. And so I think that there's a head. There's some sort of a neck. There's a torso. There's front legs, or they could be arms or fins or wings, and then there's the back legs, and then there's the tail. And the character might either walk on two feet or it might walk on all fours. But in general, they're going to have these six parts. And so what I was talking about earlier was that so if we compare let's say, a person to a horse to begin with, since that's what I had up first, if you look at all animals, they all have kind of the same bone structure, but just the length and where it's located might be a little bit different. And so the first, we have kind of the scalpula that's behind over here, and then you've got the arm coming down and then an elbow right here. And then your forearm, and then we have our palm and our fingers. But for a horse, it's located just a little bit differently where the top of the arm is really short and it's kind of inside the horse's body, and then their elbow is located kind of right, whereas our elbow comes, you know, straight out, the horse's elbow and a lot of other animals that move on for their elbow is kind of right around, like, where we would think our armpit would be. And then their wrist where it bends right here, is usually what we would kind of think is their knees. So that's kind of middle of their foot. Then the rest of our bones, you know, they all come down to form the hoof. And so in the same way, you know, if a person was that's kind of how everything's located over there. So from over here, these two bones move a little bit, and, you know, the horse can extend its foot all the way over here. But the way where it bends, so this one, this can bend, you know, all these different ways. And this will bend different ways this way, but there's a certain limitations from right here. And then from here to here, you know, obviously, you can only the knees don't bend or their, you know, kind of forearm doesn't bend that way. So you can only bend this way when. Um, when we're talking about this joint, and then for the rest of these, they curl just like fingers. So whatever happens down here, this is, you know, it doesn't really go all the way. I can't bend that way, but it can bend. You know, it'll bend different ways this way. So this can bend all the way here, and as it's bending this way, a lot of times the hoof will come up that way, too. So that's kind of how the forearm works and bends. And then when we're looking at the back, it's the same way. We've got hips, and then we've got the top of our leg, a horse's knee is up over here, whereas ours extends much further. And then we have the hawk or kind of the ankle. And for most animals, you know, this is so from here to here and here to here, a lot of times is kind of the same. And then we've got what would be our kind of bottom of the foot for most animals is going to be upright over here. And then where our toes are, this is where the animal's paws or hooves are going to be. And so in the same way as our feet bend, this hip joint can move from here, you know, anywhere kind of here, and it can come out, but not a ton. And then this joint can, you know, straighten, but it can't go past. You know, our knees don't go past that way. So this joint really, you know, is just a joint straight up and down this way. And then the same way as our ankle joint, you know, it can go pretty much straight, but it can't go past beyond this way. And where as in this joint moves in an arc this way, this joint will move can move in an arc this way. And the same way, whereas in these curl this way, it will bend with pressure a little bit this way, but most of the time, this joint is going to bend this way. Alright? So when this goes up, you know, this goes down, and when this moves up, this goes down that way. So just knowing kind of these basics how movement works with the different joints in our bodies and animal bodies will just make it a lot easier drawing any kind of animal when you know which way things go. And so I've got a whole bunch of animals over here, and I'll add this in our class handout too, so you can see it a little bit better. But I've just color coded everything. And so you'll be able to see, for example, if we compare a horse to a cat, they're basically two, four legged creatures, but you'll notice that there's some differences just in length of different bones, where the shoulder blades are attached and how the shoulder blades are attached will change the mobility of how arms can, you know, and how the hips are located, how the um, different bones can move out from there. But in the same way as with the horse. So from here, this can move different ways this way. This can move this way, but it doesn't really move can't really move your elbow past, you know, can't really move your elbow past the, you know, joint. And so it can go straight and in. And then these joints are your wrist joints, and so it will bend a little bit this way, but, you know, our wrists really like bending this way better. And same thing goes for the back leg. And we have a kangaroo usually moves upright. And so with that one, we also, if we compare the kangaroo and let's say the horse, you'll notice that, you know, the arms are kind of a little bit similar obviously, horse just has one hoof and, you know, many other animals have more toes and fingers. But then if we compare where the kangaroo differs a lot is, we'll get we have kind of a short femur and then really long kind of where the shin area is and then really long feet. And in general, when we look at a lot of these animals, just the way that everything is organized, you'll notice that most of these animals, what I was kind of like what we think of the armpit, which would really be here, but, you know, their kind of elbow is kind of where is if you think about the line of their torso. You know, most of the time, that elbow is right there kind of at the line. That's the walrus. This is a bird, so obviously it's a little bit different, but we still have same things with the big difference with the birds, you'll notice where the scapula is over here, it's a little bit different on birds because they have much wider kind of range of motion with their wings. But for all these animals, this elbow with bat, obviously a little bit different. But even with frogs, a lot of times, that bend is kind of around over there. So that's just kind of something interesting to keep in mind. And then another thing to keep in mind is the shape of the back leg. It has this kind of a I don't know what you would call this shape, a half moon or this curved shape and then it goes down from there, and then we have whatever we have a paw or a hoof or a toes or whatever it might be. If you look at all these animals, they all have this kind of a shape, even the walrus, you know, everyone. It just might be a little bit with the elephant, it doesn't come out as much and it just goes more kind of a straight. And with the frog, it's more pronounced because they have really long legs. And even with the birds, most of the time the feathers will cover most of that, so you'll just get kind of this part showing. But those are just good to notice. And then the other thing is just noticing where the knee joint is, for some animals, it's kind of in the middle. I feel like, you know, for horses or gazelles or those types of running animals, where we leave the torso and start going down, it's kind of about the halfway mark, but with a lot of other animals with dogs and cats, for example, they're pretty common. This part of the arm is pretty short or pretty long, and then we have kind of a short part for this area, and then the paw. And the same thing goes for the cat. We have kind of a long arm, so it doesn't bend in the middle, and then it just bends down here for the end. But this part of the this part of the arm especially with cats does have a wide range of movements. So you just have to make sure you extend that out when you're drawing. Those are some of the basic things that I wanted you to notice. The necks obviously start where the shoulder blades are. For all the animals. And so I'm usually kind of aware of where the arm goes in the shoulder blade and then the neck goes from there. And then depending on the animal, some animals, it's going to be longer, and for some animals, it's going to be shorter. And so knowing your animal and the parts kind of then make it easier to figure out how to draw your animals going forwards and how their arms and legs bend. So knowing where all these joints are and how anatomy works for animals, it's much easier to draw the animals action in action. And in the next video, let's look at what shapes make up each animal and what makes an animal recognizable. 4. Animal Shapes as a Concept: In this video, let's break down shapes and how we think about animals. And in the last video, we looked at anatomy and how animals are in real life. But in this video, this is kind of coming at it from an opposite point of view, where we are thinking about a concept of an animal. Like when you think about a cat, what you think about in your head. And so I've just gotten three circles with some eyeballs in it, and obviously they don't look like anything yet. But if we think about, for example, a cat, what makes a cat recognizable? So a lot of times, if you think about a cat, it's going to have point to ears, and just adding that already makes it look like a cat. And then, you know, maybe it usually has a nose, and it's got some sort of a mouth. Mouth doesn't need to be attached. It could be a mouth like that, and it would still look like a cat. Now, if I draw ears like that, all of a sudden, we're starting to think, maybe it's a bear, if we can start adding some more details to it. And so this necessarily doesn't have to be a bear, so we can make this one into a bear, and that would look like a bear, but then we could do the same here's over here, and then let's say, something like that. Now all of a sudden, we're thinking, Oh, it looks more like a lion. And so so what I want you to think about is what makes up specific animals. And, you know, obviously, head doesn't need to be a circle shape, it could be whatever shape it is. But once you start adding things to it, they start looking like animals. And so, you know, this could be maybe a goat or it could be maybe a cow. And so you might need some other things to put into it, or you could take, let's say, to me, that usually looks like some sort of a well, let's see. We can make it here. We're obviously starting to think a bird because it has a beak and we could add feathers to it and before you know it. And so once you have these basic characteristics for an animal, so let's say we've got this guy right here, it doesn't really matter where we go from here. If we already know that this is a cat, we can draw this character, very quickly. We can have a cat going this way or we could have a cat, and he can be a cat this way, but it still looks like a cat because we have these basic kind of characteristics over here. So as we talked in the previous classes about there being a wide variety of the ways that you can draw a human character, the same thing kind of applies for animals. And so I wanted to share a few slides that I've made of just different ways of drawing a cat or a dog. And so I picked kind of some of the most common ones. And so these are all different cats. That I've taken photos from picture books, and so this is one of mine, but you can see there's some very simplified. It still reads as a cat, some very simple things. Some of these animals have collars. Some of these animals have, you know, it's a lion, but it's, you know, a feline. It's got clothes on it, but it still looks like a cat. It's recognizable as a cat. I just wanted to make sure that as we jump into this, sometimes we can get so stuck into representation and wanting to show everything just like the way it is in nature, but I wanted you to kind of relax from thinking that way and realize that, you know, there's more than one way to skin a cat. There's more than one way to draw a cat, so it can be very simple, very simple shapes. This one doesn't even have a nose or mouth, and it still looks like a cat. And so, just kind of relax. And once you figure out the basics, then you can kind of build on that. And, you know, any one of these characters, if you just change some of the details, they could be a different animal. And so here's some different ideas for dogs. Obviously, dogs come in a lot of different shapes or, you know, a lot of different breeds and sizes, and some are fluffy and some have, you know, thin fur and different shaped faces and bodies. And so these are just a few different ways of doing dogs. We have you know, from the utterly most simple things from Christian Robinson to things that have a lot more detail. I love Carter Goodrich's Zorro books. The animals in those just have the most fun expressions. Just a very simple, kind of a boxy dog. And then we have kind of anthropomorphic dogs that are wearing outfits over here. And I'll include these in your handout, too. And we've got some birds. And with the birds, it's kind of the same thing with the dogs, where we have a big variety of birds. There's different shapes, some have long necks, short necks, different colors. But in general, you know, they're still kind of built the same, but, you know, just different proportions, just like dogs. And so they still all have wings and feet. But you just draw them in different proportions to make all these different animals. And some are, you know, very simple, made from just literally circles and, you know, half circles and straight lines, and then some, you know, have a lot of be very painterly and have a lot of characteristics to and we've got some foxes and bears. They're pretty familiar. So with foxes, a lot of times you'll notice they will have they have kind of similar characteristics as cats, but a lot of times foxes, you will notice. Obviously, you know, the color is going to be different. But most of the time for foxes, they're going to have kind of longer skinnier snouts. If you look, if you think about compare it to the cats, they kind of have longer elongated faces, and then they have the big fluffy tails, which then makes it different than a cat, even though both have triangular ears. And then we've got some different kinds of bears, and bears are really fun to draw because they're kind of big and kind of lumpy. It's a big kind of a mass to draw. So we have some very simple shapes, geometric shapes, very painterly. We have some anthropomorphic looking bears over here. Personally, I like drawing bears, but there's just a whole lot of different ones over here. We've got different kinds of bugs, and I just kind of lumped all the bugs together, but there's a lot of Be books. So here's different illustrators versions of bees. And kind of one thing that you might want to think of is if your character is, you know, one of the main characters of a book or if it's just a book that's kind of a plot based book, how much detail you want to add to your characters, if you want them to have a lot of expressions or if they're just kind of in the background and they don't have a big role in the book. Under the sea, fishy creatures over here, and fish have there's not as many fish books as there are books with, let's say, mammals. Mammals are kind of the most common animals to put in picture books. But there are this is from Clark the Shark. We've got Nugget and fang. We've got Pop Pop fish or Narwal and jelly books. And then we've got some finding Nemo. And some other ones over here. But even, you know, between Benji Davis and Sophie desmas, you know, there's a wide variety, but we can usually, you know, we can tell it's an octopus. It's got a big bulbous head, and it's got some arms. This one doesn't even have the right amount of arms, but, you know, it's got tentacles coming out, and we know it's an octopus. So at this point, I hope that you've kind of got some gears starting to turn in your head, and you're starting to think about shapes and the basic kind of minimal requirements on what to make what makes a specific animal, the specific animal. And I hope that you start kind of paying attention when you are either looking at photos or reading picture books for reference. Okay. And so in the next video, we are going to start talking about how to draw kind of realistic animals. And then after that, we will talk about how to draw anthropomorphic animals. 5. Reference Image Collage: In this video, we'll start talking about how to draw more realistic animal characters. And I figure we'll start with this because I think that this probably feels easier for most people to draw, kind of look at an animal, and then try to emulate that in your illustration. I come from a fine art background, and so for me, I really tend to want to look at something, you know, down to the nitty gritty, and I want to draw it realistic. And it's been kind of a long journey for me to figure out how to simplify characters and make an animal kind of cute and cuddly or make it look grumpy. And so all the kind of things that I've learned over the years from trying to draw really realistic to drawing more illustrative animals, I'll share that with you. And if you've already taken parts one and two of this class, you're going to be in great shape because we are going to use a lot of those principles that we learned in those classes and apply them in this one for animals as well. Alright, let's get going. So when I'm working with reference photos and on the iPad, what I will do most of the time and sometimes even if I'm working on paper, I will usually have a set of reference photos, and I like to put those together. And so I'm going to add the photos over here. So I've got one and then I've got another one. So this is my dog character. And these are copyright, you know, open photos that I've downloaded from pixels. And so these will be part of the class. I'll include these photos. And if there's a lot of extra stuff that I don't need, a lot of times, I'll just cut my character or my photo out of there. And now I've got my main character. There's not a lot of information here that's interesting to me. I like the way that some of the fur is here, so I'd rather keep that than this. And then my photo is kind of dark, so I'm going to lighten it up a little bit, so I can see kind of basics over here. Maybe even still that. There we go. So now I've got all my reference photos together, and what I'll do from here, I may or may not lump them together, and then I will save that onto my iPad. And then when I'm actually working on my sketches, I can bring that I'm open Canvas Ops and then do reference, and then my image will show over there. And this is the previous image, I've saved this a few times. And so I can import whichever image that I've done. This one was the one that we just saved. The nice thing with the reference on iPad is I can move that around wherever I want. I can zoom in if I want to just look at one part of something from my reference images, but it's just nice nice to have over here. Sometimes it gets a little bit finicky. And so the class is going to include, I have reference images for a dog, a few for elephant, and then a few for a bird. And so let's start with our dog first. 6. Drawing Exercise: Dog: And let's bring our dogs up, put a new canvas on top of them. And so when I'm looking at the dog character over here, what I'm thinking, let's see. It's probably a good color. So I'm seeing kind of a round head on all of these. That's kind of my basic kind of shape underlying shape over there. And then from there, if we look at the side profile, dogs have snout. And if the mouth was closed, it would, you know, kind of go something like that. If the mouth is obviously open over here. And thing to remember with dogs is their mouth can go, you know, pretty far into their cheek, I guess. But if we're still thinking about kind of basic shapes, it juts out. I'm thinking the mouth is closed, and then there so it's kind of a kind of a lopsided little square or rectangle that gets put on the edd. And then over here, if we think about this rectangle the way that it lands over here, kind of lands right here, and then it juts out. Thinking that if the mouth was closed, and since same thing over here, the mouth is kind of well, it's open, so it's a little bit bigger than what it usually would be. But something kind of about and then from there, doggies have a neck and the ears for this breed of dog, some either Australian shepherd or some sort of miniature. This one, the ears flop up a little bit higher, but if I'm trying to stay kind of similar to that, I might draw the ears down here and then the neck. And then if we look at the rest of the body, so we talked about the six spots, so we've got a head, we've got the neck, and then the torso, most of the time is kind of shaped like a bean with the dog, it goes up a little bit, and then it kind of comes out like that. And then, remember, we talked about the armpit or the elbow. So most animals will have kind of where the neck starts. There's kind of a line over there. And then we've got and then this is the paw. And then remember that half moon kind of a shape or that kind of crescent shape that goes down, and then we've got paw over there. And so the paw in general, so we've got kind of a straight line that tapers. We've got the half crescent and then there's a straight line or a box from there. And then for the paw, it's kind of a I see it as a shape, kind of something like that. And then there's the toes that go on top of that. So that's kind of how I see it, or it could be almost like that. And so that's kind of the shape that I'm thinking. And then we have a tail that's not super visible. And then on top of that, now we have kind of the basic shape of the dog, and then on there, we start adding our fur. And now that we've got Oops things simplified a little bit, we could take this or bring the opposite opacity down. We can also get a little bit of a nose going over here, oops. I think dog noses in general are a straight and then there can be a little bit of a point and then it goes down that way. Then same thing over here, we've got the nose and then it goes out and then nose over here. Now if we take our reference ups, we forgot to draw our neck over here. Then let's add our reference photo so now we can see our doggies over here. And the fun part comes, if you remember, we were looking at these pictures earlier. See where's our dogs. Um, it's up to you how you want to draw kind of special characteristics. So, you know, we've got dot eyes, there's circles. This one, it's just fluff, this one, it's just, you know, a line. We've got dots, dots, little teeny, tiny eyes, big eyes. So there's all different kinds of eyes that you can do. Some of them have, you know, big pupils in the middle, the black dots, and some of them have little. So it just depends how you want this one even has a little bit of color inside over here. And so it's up to you then how we want to start bringing this dog to life. And so from here, so we can work on this guy first and so we'll add all of our fluff over there. All right, so from here, if we're just looking at the face, I wanted to kind of make two different versions of this. Let's make one where it's a little bit more realistic, and then we can make one where it's a little bit more kind of cartoony. And we've got our basic shapes, and now we'll add some of that fluff over there. And instead of making all the nobbes over here, if you remember, we talked about simplifying things, I'm going to simplify. And then since this dog is fluffy, actually, we'll probably start with a line and then let's see how do we want to. And then from here, let's do that. And then we've got our nose. We could add a little highlight on there, and let's see, we'll do kind of smaller eyes. And then a lot of times, it doesn't matter kind of which kind of a character you're drawing, but it's nice to add some eyebrows because eyebrows really make that character. I don't want him to look mean, so I'm going to make him kind of even. And then we can, I'm just going to make a closed mouth for now. And we'll do. I'm following kind of this square that I posted. And so now. And then if we wanted to, we could add all the so let's say he's got a a little line and then something like that. And so here's kind of one kind of a dog character. And then if we want to simplify it even more, I'm going to put both ears on the top. And then instead of trying to make this area look three dimensional, I'm going to simplify it like this. The nose could be big or small. I'm just going to make it big. And now we have kind of two different versions of this dog where one is a little bit more realistic looking, and then the other one is a little bit more simplified. And the same things would go for the fur. And one thing that I wanted to mention when we are talking about fur and furry animals so instead of making the whole animal furry, it's better to alternate. And so if you think about grass, Oops. We don't draw grass like that. That would make really boring looking grass. So we alternate. We're going different directions, and so that makes for much more interesting looking grass. And so the same thing kind of goes for animal if you're drawing fluffy animals. So not both sides. I usually is nice to alternate. So at the top, I would make kind of straight. And you could add maybe one or two, but adding straight lines over there and then adding you know, there's big long lines over there, straight line over here. And then adding fur on this side and adding fur and a straight line. Well, it's not a straight line, but I guess a non fluffy line, you could say. And then we could add fluff over here. And so that just gives a more balanced, same thing for the tail that we can't fit over there. And you could add fur over here if you wanted to and then do whatever kind of eye you want to do. And so then that way, we just have a much more balanced looking character than if I was drawing the whole character. I know the dog is fluffy on both sides, but if I'm drawing if I'm drawing fluffiness on both sides, it just it just doesn't it ends up being too busy and all the lines are too busy. And if you remember what we talked about in the previous class about simplifying shapes, the same kind of goes for animal character. So simplifying lines and not drawing every single. So for here, I don't need to draw every single knob of the knee and alternating. It's a different drawing style, and for some people, it works. But in general, when you're doing picture books, just simplifying things instead of drawing every single nook and cranny and knob will make for more pleasing looking kind of simplified characters. So from our doggie, let's get into our elephant. 7. Drawing Exercise: Elephant: Alright, so the second animal that we'll work on is an elephant. And I picked an African elephant. They have kind of bigger ears. Indian elephants have slightly smaller ears, and so I thought African elephants would be more fun and expressive. And so our anatomy comes into good play over here. And if we look at the elephant, so I've got one photo from the front, and we can kind of see it's kind of an interesting shape. So it's almost I think of it, it looks almost like a peanut, honestly. Doesn't it. But in general, I would probably like to think of this more as just kind of an oval to simplify it a little bit. And then the ears are kind of like a rounded triangles. And then we've got tusks and they kind of go out at the same angles as the ears come in. And then from the face, we also have the trunk. And so going to draw that like that, and then our eyes are over here on the side. And then from the side view, it's the same thing. So we've got big ear, the top part is curved and then the bottom, almost like a pizza slice. Then for the torso, the elephants don't really have a whole lot of a neck, so the head looks like it almost goes straight into the torso. And so it's kind of like a chunky peanut. Then we've got the face looks um, it's almost like a rectangle or a parallelogram that's kind of off to the side. And then from there, we've got the trunk. And then from here, kind of at the same angle as what the ears are, we've got the tusks coming out. And then for picture book purposes, for here, for realistic purposes, eyeball is over here, but for picture book purposes, eyeball could be where you want it to be. And then for the feet, we've got armpit over here, we've got a straight line, and then we've got this last part right here. So in general, we've got kind of like a straight line for the leg, and then we can either keep it straight or there's a pad on the bottom. Same thing, we can't see it properly, but we've got kind of a straight line, pad over here. And over here, we see a little bit of that crescent shape from where it's coming. And then we've got the pad over there, and then we've got the tail. Tail, well, tail and we'll just make the tail go over there. All right, there is our basic shapes for our elephants from here, it would be pretty easy to simplify or we can make these into these already look really nice as picture book characters already. I could almost keep this just as the way it is and add my tusks and then however the nose, however I want my nose to go. Then with all the wrinkles, I would probably want to add some lines over here. And then if we want to make it more expressive, we could add some cute googly eyes, and adding the adding the eyebrows just really makes a big difference because if we don't have eyebrows, it could be kind of it can be we don't really know what the expression is, but the eyebrows, um, make a big difference in how our character looks. So it's really important, in my opinion or pretty important to try to incorporate eyebrows into your character design, however you can. All right. And then let's look at our other characters over here. So if we want to do more of a simplified shape, I could just choose to make these completely just boxy. Same thing over here. But again, a little bit it's nice to somehow alternate something. And so I could choose to do that. And then for the ops and for the back leg, I could choose to do something like that. And then in general for picture books, it looks nicer, or it looks cuter when the heads are a little bit bigger. So for my character design over here, if I'm trying to do a really cute cute design, I would make my head bigger. So do some sort of an ear. And then I want to add some sort of a mouth over there. Then I can have my simple eye or I could do some fun eye. And I can simplify that too. Then they have their little toes in the photo. A lot of times adding cute little details might be fun. I could even add little wrinkly parts to it if I wanted to. Then if I wanted to do a little bit more of a detailed, if that's my simplified one, I could try to do a little bit more add some more. Adding a little bit more tapering, instead of making things boxy, adding just a little bit of lines over there. But a lot of times the designs will look nicer instead of making instead of making kind of the legs and the arms and parts of your character very kind of uniform, it's a lot of times will look nicer if you choose to either taper them one way or another, so tapering that way, or you could taper where the elephant feet could be that way. It doesn't have to be a lot. You see, it's just a little bit over here. This is a little bit more extreme. But tapering things or even having parallel lines, just lines that are move out a little bit, make for more interesting visuals or having one side straight and the other side curved. General principles to keep in mind. Then there's the knee. If I'm trying to do more realistic, I'll add that more of a curve line and make sure it continues into my There we go. Oops. There we go. I could add wrinkles here and there or shading. Then let's do. Let me bring my reference photo up so we can see a little bit better. The body I feel like the heads and the faces are always the most important. I'm going to add my reference image over here. I've already collected my photos. Let's look at what we got over here. We've got ears. And then there's some wrinkles that go down this way and some shading this way. We'll do the trunk that way. Well, look at how cute his mouth looks. Now that you've seen me sketch a couple of different animals, I want you to take some time and either use the photos that I've provided you as reference in this class and sketch your own animals or pick a different animal and find some reference photos and sketch your own animals. And what I would love for you to try is do two different sketches of the same animal, one that's more simplified, and one that's a little bit more detailed. But I think it's a great exercise to start working on your animal drawing skills and get those gears working in your brains for animal characters. So this is the normal proportions for an elephant. But when you draw it kind of a cartoony or more of a picture book style, I feel like a lot of times you need to take some liberties and some things just need to be a little bit more exaggerated for them to look good. I'm also thinking of, I'm going to move the head up a little bit, so it looks a little bit more alert, like that. And so now we have two kind of cute animals. And then and then for the last part, let's get a little birdie going over here. 8. Drawing Exercise: Bird: Alright, for the birdie, we're going to cut corners a little bit and try to go a little bit faster. And so I just have one sketch of the bird. And if you are interested in learning how to draw birds, I have a separate class all about learning birds and finding out the shapes and learning how to draw birds. And so if you really want to do a bird book, that might be a good precursor for that book. So for the bird, the bird has kind of they have the same amount of shapes for the head. It's usually this kind of almost like a pizza slice, but it's a little bit bigger. Like a wider, maybe almost a third of a circle. And then if it's a smaller bird like the sparrow, they don't really have much of a neck. We just go straight into the body, but if it's a flamingo or something, then the neck would go from here, and then from the other straight line, we have the beak for flamingo, it would be a bigger beak. Then we have a tail, which is a rectangle that's wider usually on one end. Then for the legs, the other ones behind over there, we've got sticks and then we've got the other ones are behind over there, and then an eye, the wings. And so for the body of the bird, it's usually kind of a straight or a slight curve for the back. And then the body will be, you know, if it's a chicken, it's going to be nice and plump. If it's more of a hawk or something that goes fast, then it might be a little bit straighter. So let's move our character just out so we can draw on top. And so from here, Let's add some characteristics or make it into a picture book character. And so I'll go from here. And the fun thing is always adding the expression. So with birds, it's really fun. So you could, you know, normally they just have straight lines, but to give them expressions, you just need to curve things up or down a little bit. So if this bird is happy, it looks happy. If it's sad, it can be sad. If we want to make the mouth open, we can draw and then now it can be terrified or something. Oops. Then we'll draw the faces the rest of the head. And we draw his wings. I have a whole class on drawing birds. And so they have different sections of feathers. There's one, and then his other feathers come around over here. And I think just for cuteness sake, I'm going to make him a little bit plumper. We might end up giving him a bigger might get him a little bit bigger head too just to make it cuter. Not too much. Then for the cuteness factor, I'm going to make the beak a little bit smaller. We can still make him look like he's not quite sure what's happening. Then for his feet, I'm going to simplify those. Maybe we can make him look excited. Remember what I said about tilting that corner of the mouth. If we have the top of the mouth goes like that, that's a oh, no, a face or a mouth if this was a person. But then if we tilt the mouth just a little bit, really bad person. But when we either make it straight or tilt it up just a little bit, it makes that mouth excited and happy. Now we've given our little sparrow a fun little expression over here. Then to simplify. For our simplified character, we'll stick much closer to these, I might make this just straight and I'm going to simplify the wing simplify the tail, it might not even need anything. And instead of actually drawing, the feet can just be straight like that. And so there is a good example of just making simplified and more detailed characters. And for the detailed character, you could always, you know, we could add other details for them, too, if they had some fun things going on. After you've done a few exercises on practicing, creating animal characters based on Bota references, let's look at how to start creating anthropomorphic animal characters. 9. Considerations for Anthropomorphic Characters: Alright, so in this video, I wanted to look at some anthropomorphic characters, and I've taken a bunch of photos from some picture books that we have around the house to show you different kinds of options of ways that illustrators have created animal characters that kind of walk on two feet and have human like characters. And I wanted to show a nice variety because I wanted you to feel relaxed, knowing that there's no one way of doing things. Kind of the that's kind of the rule of thumb for picture book. You can illustrate in so many different styles. Most of these animals walk on four feet. But when you're creating these characters with human like features, we basically take the structure of a human character or a person's character and then superimpose them animal characteristics kind of on top of that. And so one place where you can make a decision is obviously with the hands and the feet. So, for example, with this character by Lydia Nichols, she decided that this animals going to have, you know, kind of the hoofs that Ama would have for a hand. Um, same with this lama by Anna Downey, it retains some of those the way that the limbs are shaped. So it's not completely human like, but in the books, they walk on two feet. Let's see what other ones we have. The fox has paws, and they're still shaped, kind of like the fox legs with the crescent moon shape. And but now instead of being on all fours, the fox is on all twos. And then once we move to kind of, like, the opposite spectrum of that, we get characters that have human like hand. So, for example, over here, this elephant has human like, you know, it's got fingers, it's wearing shoes. Same thing over here. These are by Kate Hindley. Um, there's some that are somewhere kind of in between. Like, it's got kind of paws and it's got forefingers on there. And so you can kind of, you know, choose to land anywhere in between the two extremes of having things being very human like to things being somewhere kind of in between. Like over here, that's not really what rhinoceros paw looks like, but, you know, it's been created, so it looks a little bit like a hand. And same over here. And then, so that's kind of about the arms and the legs. You choose how you're going to represent your characters. And in general, it's good to stick with kind of one style throughout your whole book. So if you have multiple different characters or different animal characters in your book, it's nice to stay, you know, all of them have similar kinds of hands or similar kinds of feet. So it's kind of a stylistic choice that you make. Another choice that you can make with humanizing these characters is are they going to wear any clothes, and what kind of clothes do they wear? So if you think about Donald Duck, you know, they and like these characters on the top of there, they're wearing shirts, but there's no pants. Same over here. And when you have animal characters, that is totally fine. Or sometimes you might get a character. This one, these ones are just wearing shorts. You might get something. This one's just wearing pants and shoes. Or you might just get something where they're wearing a bow tie or something like that to indicate that they have some of those more human like characteristics, and some, you know, characters are wearing full sets of clothing. And so when you're making these decisions for your book, what kind of hands and feet they're going to have, what kind of proportions they're going to have, if they're going to be wearing clothes and how much clothes they're going to be wearing, um, the one of the things that you can take into consideration is what is happening in the book? What are the animal characters doing in the book? Are they going to be, you know, do they need to be grabbing things or, you know, are they living in a forest or are they living in kind of more like a city or somewhere, like in a house? And kind of depending on that, you know, how close to people are they living if they're doing things that people are doing a lot. They live in a civilization with cars, you know, then maybe it makes sense for them to be wearing clothes if they have technology. But if it's, you know, if they live in more of a simplified thing and they live in nature or do more kind of things that animals would do, then it might make more sense to have them kind of look a little bit more naturalistic or maybe less clothes or something like that. You can also think if, you know, will the clothes add anything to the storyline of the book or will it add anything to, like, the characters of the book, anything to their personality? Um, is there something that the character has that makes them distinctly that character. And so those are just good things to think about and have in the back of your mind when you're making these decisions and then kind of try to keep it consistent within the whole book. Alright. And in the next video, let's jump into some details and talk about facial features. 10. Animal Expressions: So in this video, let's talk a little bit about adding expressions to faces. And if you've taken the previous class, we've talked about different kinds of expressions and putting expressions on faces. And so I decided I'm going to put this. This wasn't in the previous classes, I made it for this class, but I figured we'd have a reference, so when we draw animals, we could look at something while we're trying to work on. Before we start putting emotions, I just wanted to talk about some decisions as you are coming up with your characters. So when you're drawing your characters, let's say, I'm going to draw a horse character over here, and it's going to be a very simplified horse character. And so if this is my horse's head, the first thing to decide is how my features lay on my character. Now, do I want to have just a side profile? With the horse kind of looking, you know, I guess you could say normal, or then a lot of times, what I'll see is if people have googly eyes, you know, you can have that one eye like that, but a lot of times, what I'll see is I'll see both eyes on one side of the face. The nose is still, you know, facing forwards, but then the eyes are kind of from the side. And so this is just kind of up to you, how you want to draw your character um, then you if I'm looking at my horse from the front, here's the eyes. And then I'd probably I could have my eyes like this on my nose. Or, you know, my eyes could be together like this. So you just have to kind of decide how your character is going to look, how the different things are going to land on their face. So you know then how to change it. So let's say this horse, let's say we're going to just do just eyeball like this. Alright. And then for the mouth, too, normal horse mouth would kind of be over here, but sometimes I see the horse mouth put over here, so it's kind of up to you which one looks better for you. And so there's a little bit of always play with different characters. If I want to do a dog, let's say it's going to be very similar. Let's say this dog is gonna have a floppy ear. So I've got kind of the basic idea of the ball and then the muzzle coming from there. We've got There we go. He's got a nose. Over here, I could do, you know, same kind of eyes, but just for the sake of this exercise, I'm just going to put the eye the same, and then I'll put my mouth, and then I'll add eyebrows so that you can barely even see the eyebrow, but it still adds character over there. Alright, so let's give these characters some expression. So if we want to make them smile, so obviously, I'm just going to simplify these so we can kind of move through this faster. Alright, so if we want to kind of exaggerate and give them a bigger smile or if we want to if I want to open that mouth, I might decide to to open up the mouth like this. On the side, or I might decide that I want to open the mouth like this on the side. It's kind of up to you which way you want to go. And then if I want to, let's say, I want to make, like, a face where it's kind of really, um elongated, I could decide to then you know, maybe so maybe this guy is going to be really excited. We're going I'm going to make the eye bigger. We could have actually, if they're really excited, usually, pupil go larger if it's something exciting. I could even add something like that. Like I said, these are I'm just trying to go faster. If I wanted to make it even happier, I could bring that up like that. And then if I'm going for my dog, let's say I wanted Um, so let's make them look a little bit more scared. So instead of pulling this corner of the mouth up this way, I'm going to pull it that way. And then maybe the ears going to go up. Ear could go all the way up over here, too. And usually when we do I do scared faces, it's, you know, looks something like that. So now I'm stretching the face out. Maybe that e needs to be. Maybe that is gonna go like that. And then let's say they're really angry. So I'm kind of going to from here, let's do kind of, like, maybe something kind of like this guy right here. And so now I'm going to bring that eyebrow down, and then I'm going to do a flared nostril. You know, that guys really angry, and then let's do a different kind of angry face for this dog. So with the dog, maybe he's wrinkling his nose. And then usually the ears kind of go against the head. I can even move this like this. And sometimes the eyebrows can even lift beyond over there. And maybe we can do a sad one. So if this is a sad one, and then maybe it'll just be really down over here like that, just a teeny tiny little mouth. And so the mouth moves a little bit more than what is, you know, in general, possible with an animal, but you just make it you just kind of figure it out as you go. But there can be a lot more kind of things that move. So if we want to do kind of like a oh face, like this one right here, we can make it so that the mouth goes all the way out. So if we do that for the dog, so maybe the ears are gonna come up, and then we have a big eye or maybe it's like a interested eye, the people's really big. And then we'll bring it all the way over here. So I was trying to figure out if I bring that I could try to bring the lips all the way over here like this, but I feel like this looks better for the ooh ooh face. And so you can see, you know, it can go all the way. This mouth can move all the way from here to here. And we just keep the muzzle shaped the same, but the mouth moves inside over here, except for when they're angry and it's scrunched and kind of the same thing goes for the horsey, too. So keeping the head shaped the same, but just things move inside over there. So that's kind of my general directions on how I do expressions. And I just wanted to show one example of this is one of the characters from my book Kitty and Cat opposites attract. And so this is kind of like the general grumpy cat that we have. And then here are just some of the other. And so we've changed the eye shape a little bit over here. This is where they're kind of tired. And you can see it's kind of tilted over to the side just a little bit, and I give that illusion just by moving everything over. And then the muzzle is a little bit over, you know, down that way. And same thing over here. The mouth moves, the muzzle isn't getting a whole lot bigger. And we have kind of an indignant face, kind of a satisfied looking face. We still have the big black eyebrows over here, but, you know, they're just up and somebody's been awoken, and then this one, you know, screeching. The kitty cat had just bit his tail over here. And so just showing different ways, and then here, everything he's been wet, so everything is kind of elongated long. And so you'll see how I'm kind of squeezing and moving things to give different expressions for cat and how expressive an animal can be, as well. So a little as a little exercise, at this point, you'll have these in your class handout. You'll have the emotions in the class handout. If you want to take either your bird character or your elephant or a dog or whatever other animal that you want to sketch and practice during this class, if you wanted to take that and try and give that character a variety of different expressions, that would be a great way to keep working on your skills right now. And I have a little bonus video coming up next on how to draw expressions if you are dealing with a bird beak. And then after that, we'll get into adding personality into our animal characters. 11. Adding Personality: In part one of this series, we talked about character and plot based books. And when plot based books, your character basically just, you know, there's things going on or, you know, maybe this character, let's say we have a dog character, like, it could be that the thinking about it, the character of the animal is not super important to the plot. So we're not talking about how this dog is feeling or what it's doing. It's basically just an accessory to the book as the book moves on through its paces. But in more of a character based book, we are talking about um more specifics. So we want to know we usually know if it's a girl or a boy. We know how old they are or about how old. You know, we know specific things about them, what they like, what they don't like. The book usually concerns about their feelings and their emotions, and we know a lot about, you know, the internal workings of this character. And so if you're trying to build a character like that, it's really good to know some of the details about that character, so you can incorporate that into their design. So it could be Is your character old or young? Are they funny? Are they shy or are they outgoing? Is it a boy? Is it a girl? You know, all these kinds of things are going to affect the way that you draw this character. And so let's say, if I want to make something that's more masculine. We also talked about shapes in that first lesson, so I'm not going to deep dive into those, but, you know, we talked about round shapes, kind of S curves, those kinds of things are more feminine. If it's more angular, those things are going to be more masculine, things that have a lot of angles, like, uh, uh, triangles, those are going to look kind of evil or, you know, those are usually associated with, you know, things that are more spiky, evil, and things that are round and voluptuous are usually more happy go lucky, you know, easy easygoing characters. And so all those kinds of, you know, that shape language, those are also good to keep in mind. And so what I thought we would do is, let's make this character into a boy character and a girl character. So let me duplicate it. Alright, so here we have three of the same characters. And so now let's try to make one that's, girl. Maybe she's outgoing. Um, I don't know. Maybe she's young. And then maybe this one's going to be a boy. And then this one could be more shy and she could this character could maybe be more of a teen. And then I thought maybe we could do, like an old old I don't know. I guess it could be a man. Is it gonna be grumpy? And so now we can kind of try to incorporate some of these things into our characteristics. And so if I want a character that's going to be more young, in general, we have a bigger forehead. And so just changing, that makes a big difference, and then we could have this for a teenager, it can be somewhere in between. And then if we're old Duter, then maybe it's going to be, you know, something like that. And that gives a little bit to start off. And so let's see. So this is going to be a girl. She's outgoing, so maybe we'll have, like, might be kind of fun to have if one side is, I'm adding a little bit more curves over here. You know, they could almost be like heart shapes over here. If I wanted to add that, but I want her to have a little bit of a spunk to her. So I think we'll add some maybe bangs. So I'm just kind of thinking out loud over here. So I'm adding a little bit of some fur. Maybe she's got some scruffy marks on her. Again, adding some more roundness soft shapes. And then if we are we really just want to stay simple, we can just keep little dot eyes for her. If I wanted her to be really cute, I could give her big, you know, bigger googly eyes. But I'm going to also let's see what happens if we set her eyes. Just gonna set those out a little bit more. Be a little bit more lower. So I kind of want big eyes, var set. I'm thinking still softer shapes. Alright, I think that looks pretty cute. So here's our younger little girl character. And then we've got our teen who's shy. And so maybe maybe his ears maybe his ears can be a little bit more off to the side like a shy dog. And then I'll do more angular for him. So thinking about shape of the nose, shy smile. I like them having a little bit of bangs or something, gives a little bit more. But maybe because he's shy, maybe his hair isn't as spunky as this little character. And then for grandpa character, maybe I'll add some extra things for him. And for him, we're gonna add some jowels. I think I wanted to make the eyes a little bit bigger, add some wrinkles for him. Maybe he's got some bushy eyebrows. Like, usually, Grandpa, we could even add a mustache for him. Maybe he's got a little bit kind of some sort of a beard thing going on. And he can have a big old nose. Oh, no, he was supposed to be grumpy. I forgot. Uh, let's see. I need to change his eyebrows to look more grumpy. Maybe he's got like one. I like that. Maybe he's got like one thing coming over there. Alright, he's supposed to look grumpy. Let's give him some grumpy eyebrows. Maybe he's not as grumpy as he could look, but he's looking a little grumpy, at least. Here we go. So that was kind of a very quick study. So we've got three different character it was the same base character, but we've changed some of the characteristics in each one just to change it and make it look more like a girl, for the girl, even if we wanted to go more, what do you call it? We could even give her eyelashes if we wanted to. Yeah, maybe she can have more of a personality over there. There we go. Now she looks more outgoing. And then we've got a little bit of a shy teen over there. Maybe he's got a crush on somebody, and then we've got the grumpy grandpa over there. And so, same basis, but just changing it different ways. In the next video, let's look at how shapes and proportions affect your character. 12. Bonus: How to Animate a Bird Beak: And I wanted to add just a really quick little bonus before we get into our exercise and our next video. I wanted to just show you if you had a bird. And we talked a little bit about we had that sparrow. Usually, my bird mouth goes inside of the circle of the head. Or whatever shape your head is going to be, and then it goes from here. And if you so it's fairly simple. I already showed you if you want to do happy face for your bird. But what happens when you need to draw a beak from the front? And so I just wanted to give you a few examples of that. And so, usually, let's say this is our bird, and this is our bird from the front. And so this would just be regular expression, neutral expression. And so then when I wanted to do happy let's just work on the mouth. And so the eyes are the same, you know, as a human eye. And so if I do a mouth like this, it looks happy. I can open the mouth. And so what I would do is I would do that. And then if I want the mouth open, and then I just connect over here. And so now it looks even more open. And so I just imagine this part moving down. And then let's say we want to do more of something upset. So if we have this over here, now it's looking upset. And so I'm basically just working inside of this thing if I want. I can also stretch it. And so for an upset or, you know, if they're going. Like, something awful is happening, you could then, you know, even stretch this down here if you wanted to. Then have this right here. And then, let's say, if you wanted to do the oh face, then I would literally like, Oh. So it's just whatever you would do on a regular human face, the mouth movements would be pretty much the same on a bird, but everything is happening kind of inside of that shape. And then if I want to do a really wide something, then I usually just keep this kind of like the cat muzzle example, and then I could just move that like that or make it a little bit bigger or maybe exaggerate these things down that way a little bit. But in general, I try to keep kind of the muzzle or the beak shape the same. Um, or I guess if it's super happy, then the eyes could even be closed, something like that. And so that's how I would do Brdfaces or bird beaks. Alright. In the next brief video, let's talk a little bit about adding personality to your character. 13. Exercise: Shapes Defining a Character: As a short little exercise, let's work on those shapes and proportions. And so let's think about so let's think about proportions and shapes in a character. And so if we are going to have something that's friendly, and then we'll have something that's evil, let's say, or, you know, not so nice. And when we are talking about friendly things, we usually think about, you know, round shapes, any kind of, you know, bean shapes, those types of things. And when we're talking about evil, you know, things that are pointy and yeah, just more straight. And so let's think about doing two cats. And since I can't really think of dogs being evil, so let's do an evil cat. And so if we try to do a friendly cat, first of all, maybe this cat has kind of a bigger head, and so maybe it's got kind of more rounded ears. I'll do I don't know. Maybe it's a younger cat. Maybe if we want it to be friendly, we want it to be kind of a cute cat, maybe it's got a smaller body. I'll make it walking over here. Alright, so I'm thinking this cat is a little bit It's kind of cute and it's a little bit chunky and maybe it's got a collar on with a little thing on it that'll make it look like somebody owns it. And maybe even the tail is like, maybe it's got kind of a cute little cute. Well, maybe it needs to be a little bit longer. So I feel like right now I'm doing it's too proportioned and so something needs to change on it, so I'm doing there needs a bigger body or it needs a smaller body. So let's do something like that. And then I'll try to do how about like that. Maybe the ears are even bigger. It's got cute little whiskers. And we probably need to move everything down. Something kind of like that, maybe. Try to keep all my lines soft. Alright, so maybe for a quick sketch, something like that works. All right. And then let's work on kind of an evil cat. So everything over here is soft and friendly looking. And then for more of an evil cat, maybe this cat's going to be hunched over. Maybe even its tail is, you know, angular instead of it's not quite right. Maybe it's got scraggles on it. Who knows? Putting the ears kind of off to the side, making them pointy and sharp. And so this is very we're very much in stereotypical. Uh, I like it better when they're going over here, so I'm going to try to make him look like he's kind of looming. It's gonna be a little bit smaller. Give him some more pointy eyebrows. Well, it's not really looking that evil, but at least it's looking more evil than the other one. Might be good idea to look at one of those, like, hairless cats. Well, we'll just go with this. Actually, you know what? We should probably make his hair. I know that was kind of good, but maybe his tail is it's seen some better days. And so there we could have one kind of a friendly, soft, fun kitty to hang around, and then one kitty that's maybe not so friendly to hang around. So I don't know which one you would rather go pet if you saw one outside. And for this one, you could even add. These could be, like, those little you could even add soft little marks for the stripes or something like that to make it look even cuter. In the next video, we'll do a little review on what makes for a cute character. 14. Proportions and Shapes in Character Building: And so in the first class we talked about, we had the shapes game, and we talked about dividing a face with two vertical and horizontal lines into kind of nine sections. And then depending, you know, where those lines kind of intersect, you get different proportioned faces, you know, things that are, you know, high up on the face or down. And the same thing with full bodies with changing the size of the boxes or, you know, kind of segments of how we draw our people. So the same thing kind of applies for the characters. So when we kind of have an idea of who the character is, then it's fun to play with different proportions. And so I just have a couple of different examples over here. So we have this is Skippy John Jones by Judy Shackner. And with him, he's a cat, and you can see the exaggerations he has a giant head, but his ears are even, you know, are even huge compared to his head size. And then he has this teeny, tiny little body, and it just creates this adorable, cute little character. And then we have this character from the Zoro Books, and I can't remember his name is slinky or something like that. And you can see this cat character, how it's almost almost snakelike in the way that he's been drawn as he's running away from the dogs. The dogs are barking and he's running away. But I just love the way that he's been drawn over here. And you can see that these two cats have two totally different personality, just the way that they've been designed. And then we have two bears over here, and it's interesting because they're almost in kind of a similar position. We've got this bear from Lewin Fa's book, and then this is Ryan Higgins bear, Bruce. And you can look at these two bears, and you can immediately tell that they are two completely different characters. This bear is kind of grumpy and he doesn't look like he would be, you know, a very fun character, and he's got kind of a grudge with the world. And then this bear, he is kind of the main character, but it's more of a plot based book where the bear literally goes along for the ride. And he's, you know, he kind of gets into a current and he goes down a waterfall and so he's kind of a haphazard. You know, he's kind of going on a journey, but he's kind of this unwittingly being taken on a crash course down the river, kind of a character. And so you can just see, kind of, you know, from the design and from his face, what kind of a character he is. He's kind of a fun character in the book. And so those are a few examples. And then I just have a couple of books to show, too. One character that I especially love is Olivia by In Falconer, and he has just done I mean, you look at this little precocious pig. She's always got interesting clothes on, but she's still very kind of pig like in her Like, she's got the hooves or the what are the cloven kind of hooves on both top and bottom. But same thing with Skippy John Jones, really big ears and a really big head, compared to kind of a smaller body, makes for this very endearing character. And we've got little bows on the top of her ears, and she doesn't have hair, but, you know, this is how we can make it a female. And she's just, I feel like a really successful character. And then another character design that I really like is this shark from Misunderstood Shark, illustrated by Scott Magoon. And with this one, this character is a little kind of rough around the edges. He's eaten the jellyfish that's trying to that was trying to interview him. And he's kind of this gruff, gruff, very manly kind of a character. And so you can see he's got tattoo and he's, you know, just the way that he's more angular and he's got teeth. And so he's this character that's kind of rough around the edges, like said, and he is hungry and he eats things, but then he also does have all these soft shapes because he is kind of, you know, like, soft soft on the outside. And so I just wanted to show that as a kind of a fun character design for you. And then we have the dog character Gus by Chris Chatterton, and you can see that for his character shapes, he's kind of the same as the other character, the Shark, where he's very grumpy. And so you can see that, you know, just by looking at his eyes. And he's also kind of stiff. He doesn't like change. He doesn't like a lot of things, so you can just see from the way that he's standing and sitting that he's a very kind of a grumpy, grumpy character, but kind of soft around the edges. And then we see all these other characters around that are much more happier, happier characters. And so he's just the fun character design on his own. Then this is this goose from a Benji Davies book series, George John Benji Davis where we have this duo of a bear and this goose. And just by looking at this goose, you can kind of guess his personality. He's kind of goofy. He's kind of a goofy character, whereas the other ones kind of if we're thinking about traditional Disney, this is kind of like Donald Duck, and this is kind of goofy. He's kind of happy go lucky and isn't really aware of the other character's feelings, and he's kind of, you know, very much out there character, and you can just you can just kind of see that just by looking at him. He's got a lot of big emotions. And so he's just a really fun fun character design. There's a couple of and I feel like you can kind of see his larger than life personality just from the way that he's been drawn. You know, he's not the smartest character. He's got kind of a little head and kind of a big bulbous body. And then just the way that his feelings are kind of extra, I feel like the way that his wings are drawn, they're kind of like an extension of his emotions. They're very kind of not blustery, but they're kind of soft and kind of going out in the way that his personality and his feelings are. And then he's got those little two dot eyes that also give him his little personality. Then this is also not as much of a maybe character based story, but I just wanted to show it as an example of this is by Lorna Scobe and she has obviously made the decision that all her rabbits have these enormous eyes, and they all kind of stare at you. And so whenever you're looking at this book, all the characters in here just have these giant eyes, which I think is kind of funny and also the fox. So that's kind of an interesting, um interesting design decision that she's made, and she carries that out through the whole book. And on this one, you can see that in some of the pictures, the rabbit does not have eyebrows, but then when we need the rabbit to have emotions, then the rabbit does suddenly grow eyebrows to show emotions better. And then, lastly, I wanted to show this hilarious character design by Kate Beaton. This is a little pony. And you can see that the pony is completely missing a neck, and it's almost completely missing legs. It's just this kind of a bean shape, and it just perfectly goes with this kind of a wonky character. Oh, this cute little pony that everybody absolutely. I mean, the tongue is sticking out. And so everybody just falls in love with this pony. But obviously, the main character who wants to be a um who wants to be kind of a warrior amongst others is not happy about receiving this character or this pony as a birthday present because she really wanted a warrior horse. She was waiting for something like this, and then this is what she got. So it just makes for a really great reveal. I mean, obviously, it's on the cover, but she wanted this, and then we see her. Um, and, you know, they cover her eyes, and then da, da, da, here we go. And this is the pony that she got and the text reads, but they didn't get it quite right. And so I just love that character design. For this pony, it's probably something I would have never come up with myself. So these are just some things to think about. When you are coming up with designs for your characters, hopefully, this kind of provided you with some inspiration. And in the next video, we will kind of continue this discussion and talk a little bit about style. 15. Exercise: Shapes Defining Character: So we've looked at a lot of examples from books that I've showed you on these kinds of slides, and then I also showed some actual books with characters in them. And in general in picture books, if it's kind of a character based book, well, in general, too, because they're for kids, I guess, you want to try to make your characters cute. And the same principles that apply for human characters for making a character cute also apply for animal characters. We're on this slide of dogs right now. And if you remember from the first lesson or from the first class in this series, things that make stuff or things that make characters look cute are big eyes a lot of times. We have this puppy over here. We've got these characters over here and then also dot eyes are also endearing. I'm going to put slash eyes and we've got this character over here too. Then another thing that makes characters cuter, if you look at all these characters over here, the cuter characters in general are the characters that have more simplified shapes like this one over here, this one, this one, I'll put simplified shapes. Then another thing that makes your characters cuter is soft and round shapes and then bigger heads, younger characters. Younger characters usually have big heads. Soft shapes. Then lastly, in general, I would say also childlike. We talked about the big head, but just childlike proportions in other ways, meaning where the eyes are located on the head, there's usually a bigger forehead and the eyes are located a little bit lower on this character too. Then usually if the eyes are higher on the forehead, that makes it look like an older less cute character. And sometimes cuteness can also come from exaggeration of the shapes. So either bigger ears or right here, it just looks adorable when this tiny little puppy has. Um, these huge ears. And so we could say I'm talking about the face in general, we talked about the head and then exaggerated shapes or proportions. You can also think, if you remember that picture of Skippy John Jones, that cat that had the giant ears and the big head and then the teeny tiny body. I kind of the same vein of thought, in general, um these kind of these points make your character look cute. So if you're trying to create a really cute main character for your book, think about these things when you're working on it. 16. Style Considerations: Just kind of summarizing things up and talking a little bit about style for one of these last lessons in this class. So as we've already talked, there is a wide variety of styles that apply for picture books from going from something that's very flat without any shading to then things that have a lot of things going on that have a lot of shading that look very three dimensional or that have a lot of details in it. Now, the style that you pick to work on depends on a few things. One thing would be it depends if you are actually working on a book project. It would depend, in my opinion, on the manuscript, what kind of a story it is, if the story is something that needs a character that has a lot of details or if the story is a more quiet story and maybe it needs a little bit more simpler characters. And then the other thing that you want to take into consideration is what kind of work do you want to do and what kind of work do you want to show in your portfolio? And if you are doing like a character based book, like we talked about earlier, you might want to pick a style that you can have. It can be a flat style, but you want to have a style where your character can have a lot of different expressions like over here or, you know, even with Peter Brown, that character has a lot of different expressions. Unlike maybe something like this where it's kind of it's got eyes but no nose and no mouth. And so this is more of a side character that doesn't have a lot of expressions. Um, so you want your character to be able to emote, if it's a main character or it's a character that needs to be showing emotions, though. So that's something to take into consideration how you want to show that. And if you are making a book for younger kids versus older kids, that will also probably affect your character design a little bit. Obviously, simpler designs kind of go for younger kids and then fancier designs in general for a little bit of an older audience. And also not only the characters that you're drawing, but your characters also need to match the background. I just want to show a few examples, we'll zoom this out. And over here, we have these very, very simplified characters, and we have a very simplified background. And this is a book illustrated by Kennard Pack and then we have the Gruffalo, which the characters have a lot of details, and they're painted with, you know, paints in, you know, traditional paintings, and then the background has the same amount of texture, too. Then we have this book, it's illustrated by Chuck Gronik and we have kind of a very stylized character, and everything in the book, including the backgrounds are very stylized in this book. Oh, and I also wanted to mention that when this book, you'll see the main character, it's kind of made out of these shapes and then it's got black lines in it, and he's able to tie that style with the background with, you know, having lines that happen elsewhere in the background, so everything kind of goes together nicely. With this one, this is by John Hendrix. You can see that he's putting a lot of detail into his character, but his background, he's putting a lot of details over here, too. And then this is Lydia Nichols. This was one of the amas over there. If you have a very graphic and simplified style, her backgrounds are also very graphic and simplified and have that same kind of mid century modern inspiration to them. And then sometimes the backgrounds don't have to be obviously fully rendered. And so this was Lauren Ascobe's bunny Book, where they had those big eyes. And so most of this book, there's no backgrounds. It's got white backgrounds. And then we have these painterly watercolor bunnies on there. And then the same thing or the little pony book in the same way, he's got kind of a flat color, and there's black outlines. And then pretty much the rest of the book is also done with very flat colors with black outlines around everything and the lines used to add detail and texture to different places in the book. And so when you're thinking about a style of character that you want to draw, also think about the types of backgrounds that you are comfortable drawing and then mold everything together and make sure that your characters match the backgrounds that you are drawing. All right. And for one of the last bonus lessons, I wanted to include a little video about how to draw wings and make them look like hands. 17. Bonus Video: Wings to Hands: In this video, we will talk about drawing wings for animal characters and then also making the wings into hands. And before we jump into that, I wanted to actually talk a little bit about the anatomy of birds. And if you wanted a more kind of in depth lecture on birds and bird wings, you can look at my skill share class that's all about drawing birds. And so before I start simplifying more complicated things like bird wings, I like to explore the realistic subject a little bit before. So we've the spine over here, and then we've basically got, you know, kind of like the body of the bird. We have the shoulder blades are up on the top over here, and then from there, we basically have the top of the arm, and then we have the bottom half of your arm. So this part right here would be this part of your arm. And then the top part this part is kind of the thumb over here, and then we've got what would be technically the fingers. And the way that the wing is kind of structured is we have hops it kind of bends. Remember we talked about bends. So this part bends like an elbow like that. And then this part bends like, you know, like if you think about your wings like this, it bends down this way. And so when we look at a bird wing, kind of the structure, so this would be the body of the bird. And then so the elbow would be kind of here, and then it goes up here, and then we've got kind of the thumb and then the wings go out of there. And so that's kind of the bone structure underlying bone structure, so the wing will bend and fold kind of that way. When you look at the wings, you'll notice on all of these wings, there's kind of three layers of feathers. And so there's these downy feathers up on the top, and this goes both for the top of the wing. This is a picture from the top of the wing, and it goes for the underside of the wing. So there's kind of a downy kind of smooth feathers on the top, and that goes up to where the thumb starts right past this bend over here, and then there's kind of secondary feathers that go a little bit past over there, and then there's the longer feathers. Go, you know, all the way up to the edges of the wing, and then between these things, between these kind of three different layers, there's also kind of a segmentation right here where we have kind of the kind of the wings that go from the arm to the technically, from the arm to the armpit. And then these ones are the wings that are basically kind of go from here out. And so in some of the birds, it's a little bit easier to see where the different types of feathers are. So we've got three layers over here, and then you can see there's one segment this way and then there's this segment right here. And so this is the same. And so when I start making an anthropomorphic wing and I want to turn that into a hand, what I do is I'll add a bend over here, oftentimes, and then there's kind of a I make this feather into kind of a thumb, and then I'll have three or four, however many you want wings as kind of the fingers. And then the rest of my feathers kind of act as one kind of section of feathers. And then from there, I oftentimes do one and then two layers of feathers. And so that's kind of how I segment and start working my character's wing into a hand, or that's kind of how I see it. And so let's put this kind of knowledge into action. And so here I have my character, and let's copy, take his wing off, then let's turn his head. So let's think that he's uh let's think he's going to be going forward. Let's make him go forward. And like I was saying, so normally the wing would be bent in over here. And so we don't usually kind of see the elbow, um, and so it would be kind of like this where the thumb is over here, and then the fingers are over here. But let's say, you know, he's extending his arm then he's saying, kind of, we're trying to make him say hello. So let's imagine that our character he's trying to say hello over here or something. He's trying to flag something down. And so from here, do one. I usually like to do three. And then let's sketch this stuff out over here. One, two, three, and then we'll sketch that over there. Then we can get our photo reference so we can see a little bit more about the feathers. If we were adding color, this part looks like it's hidden, but we look at this bird right here, it's wing is kind of so it's not you can't see it, but the elbow would go here and then the top feathers are covering the elbow underneath over there. For the coloration, I'm not going to color this all the way in, but this would be fairly a uniform color. And then it looks like there's kind of a white stripe over there, so we could add I add a white stripe and then looks a little bit more uniform for the kind of secondary feathers over there. So this could be all kind of one color. And then it looks like there's more kind of individual feathers. And so that's kind of my sketch, and now we can kind of formalize that a little bit better. So I'm thinking that the thumb is kind of inside over here so we can't see the thumb. Maybe his other arm elbow is kind of going like this. And then I'm going to give him a little bit more head a little bit more upright, can you can make this decorative or it's kind of up to you if you wanted it to be a straight line and then it looks like they're kind of feathers that have a lighter color on the edges. So I would probably add a brown highlight like that over there for these feathers to simplify the design. He could use some longer legs maybe. Depending how I wanted to use that hand, if I imagine, let's say, I want to imagine I'm going to draw kind of a fist first. So if I imagine a fist with fingers going down like that. So if this is my so from the other angle. So if I'm thinking about a fist, you know, kind of like something like this where the fingers are kind of curled up, if I wanted to draw a wing that goes like that. I kind of imagine this structure being underneath over there. Then I might add feather over there and add one, two, maybe the feathers are a little bit longer. When I'm drawing the feathers or hand like appendages for a bird, that's how I think about it. I wanted to show just a case study of this rooster character that I've done. When I'm imagining this, I'm just imagining how I would draw a regular, you know, fist. And then wherever the wrist goes, instead of there being kind of a skinny part of the wrist, I just take a straight line down this way. And then, like said, I'll do instead of four fingers over here, I'll usually do three feathers over here. And then, like I said, this just gets extended into a wing shape instead of a wrist of a person. So that's how I imagine doing kind of wing shaped hands. And so you can see elbow, arm, and then hands going over there, and then on the other side, elbow, and then and then same thing over here. We've got, you know, he's rolling his sleeves up he's getting kind of angry. And then over here, they look more like regular rooster hands. Over here, let's see. Over here, he's grabbing, so he's got his arm kind of over and he's grabbing something over there. Then over here, he's you know, the elbows almost bending backwards with the arms going, both going kind of out and like that. Over here, we've got going straight and then trying to climb over something. And then over here, same thing. We already looked at it. Uh, up over here, here, instead of him being, you know, upright and looking cocky, he's, you know, more there's more movement going this way, but the arms are kind of the same in both over here. But over here, it's a little bit more. Instead of the elbow being down over here, the elbow is kind of up and over. Alright, so hopefully that was helpful for you in figuring out how to put wings on your ecors. And just as a super quick reference, if you are if you are trying to do some type of a hawk character, so let's say this is their wing and it needs to have some stripes. What I would do in this case is in Photoshop, I would do an Alpha lock. You can also do an Apha oc by using two fingers and swiping over and then you can see it turns the Alpha lock on. Now whatever I do on here, let's say I'm going to change color. I only colors on the pixels over there. From now, it's really easy. I could grab I don't know, some kind of a tool like that. That's how I would add them on there. 18. Case Study: Cat Character Development: Alright, so for this video, I really quickly just kind of wanted to share my process for the kitty and cat opposites attract, for the cat character. This cat character took me a really long time to come up. And the process was took me, I want to say, it took me at least probably over a month, where I did a lot of thinking and I did a lot of just sketching. And so I wanted to kind of show you um, what I did with it. And so, the first thing I did, I did draw some cats, and I wasn't happy with any of the kind of simplifications that I was making about cats. So then the next thing what I decided to do was find all the illustrations of cats on Pintrest that I could and from picture books, and I basically just went and I just copied everything that I could. So none of these are my original designs. These were just sketches or illustrations of cats that I found. Online. There's some illustrations from Calvin and Hobbs. Some of these are from pictures, some more from Calvin and Hobbs, trying to figure out how other people I think these were some that I did on my own, maybe. But I was trying to figure out, well, how are other people I think these might have been my own little sketches I was thinking. And then these ones are copies from other people's work. And I was just trying to figure out how is Oh, this is mine. How are other people simplifying their cats faces, especially the faces, and making them cute and lovable and interesting to look at? And I knew, kind of from the start that I did not want to go kind of like this Disney esque type of a cat route because I feel like this kind of a cat has been done a lot, and I wanted kind of my own design. So then these are kind of some of my early pictures. I was also doing working on this story that had a cat and a bat. And so I made some sketches thinking about that cat. And these are some of the early ones for that. I, you know, was working on stuff, but I just wasn't really happy about it. And so I kept sketching, and I sketch on a lot of random pieces of paper, and these are also sketches that I did on my iPad. And so over here, some of these top ones are I think these are my own, but then there's some of these cats were from Lorna Scobe's Catbok and then I feel like I got down to here. So this is kind of my first sketch of cat that I did that I went, like, Oh, I think I finally kind of started to figure out, Alright, this is kind of the direction that I wanted to go to. And so this was kind of the first sketch. And then from there, the idea for cat was born. And then from there you can see these are some of my early sketches for the book, and you can see the face kind of started getting shape where I have it this kind of hexagon shape, which is what technically the shape of the cat's head ended up being. This was one of the early sketches, and I tried to do some hand painted sketches because I thought I was going to hand color and hand paint some of these things first. And then I decided not to. So these are digitally composed and they're a lot more kind of fluffy. And hairy when you kind of zoom in close, but it still wasn't quite hitting the note because the story is kind of a wordless picture wordless story, and the words are kind of simple. And so I still wanted something more simpler. So after kind of putzing around a little bit more, then this is kind of the final character sketches that I ended up with. And with this one, there is I don't know if it shows up on the screen. You can see the gray part has a little bit of texture in and then there is black linework on the top, and then there's a muzzle in the middle and that's basically how cat came to be. If we look at the side view, the side view, it's kind of a simplified, either a rectangle or a bean shape. The tail is fluffy, and then the way that I treated all the feet where, you know, the triangle goes, kind of like the way it's supposed to go over for the back feet and then so it's all the top parts are kind of fluffy and then there's a stick basically that comes out with the paw at the end. And then the head has kind of a straight top, it comes down and then there's the little part that ends up being the muzzle. And then for the cheek, where it's supposed to kind of jut out, I ended up doing this kind of a curly or, you know, a line over there to indicate that. And so that's what cat looks like from the side, and then that's kind of, you know, closer to the front. You can see the expressive ears too. The ears can point straight side when he's mad and then straight up when it's more like a regular face. And so that's how the cat character came to be. In the next video, let's talk a little bit about putting clothes on our character, and then we'll be done with the class. 19. Adding Clothing, Part 1: And so since we've been working with this little bird character, I thought, let's put some clothes on this bird character. And so it's up to you if you wanted to make this character have shoes or boots. And so let's do one where we do kind of bare minimum, and then I figured we can do this other one where we add a little bit more extra. And so if we just want to kind of think about the bird, if we want the bird to be able to fly, maybe it's easy if we just add some sort of a vest to our bird. I would think kind of something like this, and then it would cover. Maybe it could have some sort of a collar. I could look up some images of vests online, but this will do for now and then maybe a little hat. Maybe he's kind of a scrappy little fella. There we go. He could have if we wanted, we could give him glasses. His glasses could be up on the top over here. Like that or if we wanted to give him he could also have glasses up over here. And sometimes depending how they sit on the animal, they don't need to have the ear part because this animal wouldn't even have ears. If we wanted him to have some sort of goggles or glasses, he could even just have a pair of he's starting to look like maybe I'm thinking he's starting to look like a scrooge or something. Maybe he could even be holding if we're talking about how do you hold I'm thinking if he's holding a candle. If there's a thing for a candle, I'm running out of space over here. Maybe he's holding a the thumb be coming I'm trying to think if the thumb would be coming out this way or not. Maybe the thumb would come out down this way. Something? No, I think the thumb would be wrapping around the other fing fingers, so maybe it wouldn't come out that way. All right, so maybe he's older older bird maybe. And then since he's older, I'll give him some little he's got that kind of scrooge thing going on. And sometimes these kind of things just happen. You just, you know, I wasn't planning on making this into an old bird scrooge character. So maybe then he's got even some sort of what kind of pants did they have on back then? So maybe it's just pants, something similar to this that just have it's got to have some sort of hole. And then maybe maybe the tail comes out of the pants, something like that. Alright, let's see what he looks like. I'm going to bring this out a little bit this way. We can't really see all of his jacket, but I think you get the general idea. This could be him holding on to that. That would be that character. Then if we want to give on full on outfit that maybe maybe he's wearing a hoodie or something. What does a hoodie hood look like? Something like that? There's a little pocket in the front and then maybe he's got both of maybe he's in a concert or something. I think he's younger one than maybe he doesn't have pants on this time. Maybe he's going to be jumping up and down or something. So this guy can be a little bit younger. Maybe we'll tilt his head up a little bit. I don't know what you'd be doing. Maybe I don't know what his face is what his face should be doing at maybe his mouth should be open after all. Maybe he's trying to sing. So I'd probably do something kind of like that. I'd probably look up some references for what hoodies look like, but just trying to do this without too many references to try to make this faster, but you get the idea. And so if I'm trying to give him sleeves, I might make them a little bit skinnier, so it doesn't look so disproportionate having ginormous sleeves for him that I can imagine his feathers could be a little bit compacted when they're inside over there and then he's got his tips of his feathers would be a little bit bigger bursting out of the sleeves. So that's what I would do for a bird character to add some clothes for them. Then let's see do you want to do? Do you guys want to do elephant? 20. Adding Clothing, Part 2: We've got kind of our basic shapes for elephants over here. Let me duplicate that. And we can put those onto the side. And so if I want to bring, I'm going to make our elephant stand up. All right. So let's see. So we want to give our elephant. I'm thinking of, you know, elephants are kind of sturdy. They're, you know, kind of blocky, so I'm going to make my elephant pretty blocky over here. I want him to be kind of stout. And so we're still doing kind of a basic human um, human characteristics, you could say. So we've got torso, we've got two legs. We're going to add some arms, and I'm just going to have him be kind of straight, you know, kind of stiff over here just to give you an idea. So if that's his body, I think now his head's not quite big enough. So it's I feel like his head should be bigger. So maybe something like that. This is a kid elephant and then we want some ears coming out like that, simplifying those as well. Then if we want the mouth to show, then the trunks got to go somewhere off to the side. Over here, you could make some stylistic choice where the run the trunk goes from the middle of the head, we've got eyes over here. Actually if we think this is the for a child like character, you want to have the eyes down below, and then let's say the trunk goes from somewhere over there and then this would be his mouth. So I can put trunk somewhere over here, and then I would have enough room for the mouth to show down below over there. I'm not sure if I'm really convinced about my character skayet, but we'll work on it. Then for clothes, let's say he's just wearing a T shirt. It's just the same thing as putting putting clothes on your regular character. Let's say he can be wearing shorts. So same thing. And then it's up to you whether you want him to have regular hands, regular feet. So maybe if we want, kind of he can have kind of kind of small smallish hands kind of like that. And so or kind of smallish fingers like that. So it's kind of a stump with fingers coming out of it. And then maybe it's the same thing. You know, it might be kind of cute if he had little, like sneakers on or something, he's got little you know, some kind of cool. Maybe they don't have the stars on them, maybe it's just a black shoe, something like that. So he could either have bare feet or then he could have shoes on his feet. But I think, having a big chunky chunky animal, then it's nice to have big chunky feet for it. But, it might look cute if he's got a big torso, you know, maybe his feet they could come down like that or you could choose to taper them. His feet could also come out, you know, kind of like the way we were drawing them over here. They could come out, you know, something like this where they get bigger and they're skinnier on the top and bigger on the bottom. It's up to you, however, you could try different things out and see which one. Tone this down a bit. A lot of times I'll sketch multiple layers and try to refine my shapes. I don't know, maybe he's got some I don't know if it's a girl. Maybe there's a flower on here or something. Maybe there's a belly button showing if he's a little bit on the trunky side. I'm thinking that ears ears would cover the shoulders. See or maybe if it's a little girl, maybe she's got some sort of maybe there's some sort of little shoes, something like that, kind of like little some sort of little Mary Janes. Maybe there's a little flower on top of it or something. There you go. Not convinced about this face yet, though. Since it's a cute little kid character, maybe it's a short little stumpy trunk. But I guess I haven't really I've never really drawn elephant character before, so I'd have to work on I think I need to work on how I want to do the trunk and look at some references on how other people did trunks. Easier to do it on the, it's still not really looking all that good. So right now, if I'm feeling really stuck, what I could do is I'm going to grab this guy. All right. So I figured out. I've gotten some other references for elephants, and it seems like elephants are a character that look best done from the side. I still want to make this work. It's easy to get the elephant trunk to work from the side because then you can still see the mouth. But if you're doing it straight, on the front, then the trouble is the trunk is always in the way. And so this is a great example. So let's do. I'll try to do a little bit of problem solving over here. We're starting to get a little bit more cuter definitely. Remember originally, remember the elephant shape the head shape was a peanut shape, if you remember. From the very, you know, when we talked about elephants earlier. And maybe if I'm drawing the elephant from this direction, it's basically going to be a mouthless elephant and then it's going to have eyebrows and then however the eyebrows are, that's how the elephants going to look. So let's to make this a little bit less. We want to delete some stuff over here. Let's see if we can get this elephant looking cuter. Maybe we'll add some cheeks like a little kid and we'll play with the head compared to the size of the body. Remember we talked about making the head bigger. If it's an older character, giving it a longer torso and longer arms, that would make it look more like a teenager. Making it more short and stout would it makes it more less of a neck makes it look more like a little kid. So you know, maybe that could be something for an elephant character from the front, and then if I draw that character from the back or I mean, from the side. Remember we did the lineup, so I could do let me do this on a different layer. All right. So we have kind of basic lines going over here, and so I'm going to do a round head. Let's see if I want there to be kind of like a mouth area over here, and maybe the trunk can come something up like something like that. Her chubby chunky little body, then she would have these cute little shoes. Her feet are a little bit more there a little bit more chunky going this way. Maybe she's got a cute little tail over there too, and then she's got arms. I'm thinking maybe she's got her arm out like this and then she's got her t shirt. Then I wonder if her trunk should also be her mouth. We wanted to there could be some I don't know if there should be some little what do you call it little mini tusks over there. All right. There we have our little elephant character, so that would be them. Hopefully that was helpful and the same thing would apply for a dog or any other random character that I would be drawing. Here's just some other examples. From designs that are super simple without any kind of shading and there's just some lines that indicate where the pants are for this character to then a lot more detail with buckles and wrinkles and things like that, but still fairly simplified, but a really fun character. You can also see the variety of characteristics. So if you look at all these, none of these elephants really have a whole lot of a neck except for maybe Mo Willems elephant. There's a little bit of an indication where it goes out and the same thing over here. But then for these two characters, just the neck seems to everything seems to continue to be one. This one is just basically a big long oval with legs and arms and everything sticking straight out of it. So just really fun character designs. This one by Corey Dorfield is also a nice simplified. All right, thanks so much for hanging out with me. And for your kind of final sketch or your final assignment for this class, I hope that you can take one of your characters, the one that you've been working on. Maybe it's the bird, the elephant, the dog, and then create both regular character that's on all fours and then create another version of it that's anthropomorphic where it's standing straight up and down. All right. And come and join me in the next video, and we will have some closing thoughts. 21. Final Thoughts: Thanks so much for joining me in this class. I hope you've learned a ton and are excited to practice sketching animals for picture books. If you love the class, I hope that you would leave a positive review for it. It's really simple. There's a little menu right here below, and in the middle, it says reviews. You just click on there, and it takes less than a minute to fill that out. I would love to get any kind of feedback, and also if you have ideas for future classes that I could be teaching. I love seeing student work, and if you've been doing the exercises in this class, I hope that maybe you would feel brave enough to post one of your sketches or your final kind of characters into either discussion or the projects section in this class. And if you wanted any kind of feedback on it, that's a great place to ask. You can post your sketch and then ask your questions about it if you've been stuck or you're not quite sure. Like, I had issues, trouble trying to figure out how to make my elephant character look kind of natural. So if you're kind of stuck with your animal character, feel free to ask questions, and I am more than happy to reply to your comment and give you some feedback. You can also post your projects and any questions on social media for me, and I just make sure that you tag me so that I see it on Instagram, I am under America Jaws, and then on BluSky I'm at Mica Hokanen. And if you just tag me, then I'm happy to give you feedback on social media, too. And so as I've mentioned several times in this class, this class is part three of a collection of character design classes. In the first one. We talk about character design in general. We talk about and color and adding personality to your character. In the second part, we talk about doing your character, drawing your characters consistently, and then this third part was how to draw animal characters. And so if you're wondering or want to be more rounded and you haven't done those first two classes, I encourage you to do those first two parts of this class series as well. Also have other picture book related classes, a bird drawing class, and some watercolor classes on skill share. And if you'd like to see those, you can just click on my name above and see all the other classes that I have available. Thanks so much for joining me. I cannot wait to see your sketches and designs in the projects below. All right. I'll see you in the next task. Bye.