Character Creation for Animation: Shapes, Color, and Expression

Overview

“I have always been fascinated by animation. I would binge as much as I could. When I was a kid, Disney was considered cute and lovely, it passed the parent test easily. As I grew up, it was obvious I was not made for science and maths. I became an expert doodler. I was lucky to have an incredible anatomy teacher who encouraged me to study at The Florence Academy of Art in Italy. At first, it seemed like a 180º shift. I had always loved crazy expressive bouncy characters but now I was entering the world of still life setups and models holding their poses for 5 weeks straight. After two years I found myself a little stuck. Every model was beautifully keeping their poses, the light on their face was very appealing but I was missing the spontaneousness of animation. I asked one of my portrait models to smile, maybe hold a more drastic expression. The result was so bizarre that we went back to the resting face he was used to and never attempted that again. It became clear to me that the study of anatomy I was doing was meant for animation and illustration. My most well-known drawings come from Fan Art. If you ever need to drum up an audience, find something you love and the fans will find you. I had that experience with Outlander. I started doodling quick drawings as I was reading the books and sure enough, people found my work! After five years I have partnered up with the southern sassenachs and raised over 10.000 USD for charity. Long story short, things slowly trickled in. Social media helped to keep an eye on opportunities. I’ve worked on apps for kids, children’s books, murals, character designs, and worked on the storyboard for Madrid 2120, the Goya winner this year for Best Animation Short. In all of them, I was lucky to be given the chance to learn on the job.”

In this video lesson Laura Ewing Ferrer addresses the topic: About Me, which is part of the Domestika online course: Character Creation for Animation: Shapes, Color, and Expression. Reveal your character’s personality by working on a concept and illustrate it using Photoshop.

Partial transcription of the video

“INTRODUCTION PRESENTATION - ABOUT ME Hi, I'm Laura Ewing and I'm an illustrator and character designer from Madrid. In this lesson, I'm going to tell you how I got from student to character designer and storyboarder. I've always been obsessed with all these characters from movies and shows I watched when I was little. I always watched all these Disney classics that were beautiful and so well done. I was glued to the TV, staring at it, watching how they were blinking, breathing. They looked alive, I couldn't believe they were drawings. They were my first inspiration. I was so obsessed that I...”

This transcript is automatically generated, so it may contain mistakes.

Course summary for: Character Creation for Animation: Shapes, Color, and Expression

• Level: Beginner
• 100% positive reviews (297)
• 8527 students
• 5 units
• 22 lessons (4h 39m)
• 16 downloads

• Category

  3D & Animation, Illustration

• Software

  Adobe Photoshop

• Areas

  Animation, Character Animation, Character Design, Drawing