Dynamic Animal Illustration for Children’s Stories
Defining the Intention: the Action Line
A course by Julie Mellan , Illustrator
About the video: Defining the Intention: the Action Line
Overview
“In this lesson, I will teach you how to simplify your intention with a single line, which I call “the action line”. This will be the spine of your animal. It will convey the entire mood of the subject.”
In this video lesson Julie Mellan addresses the topic: Defining the Intention: the Action Line, which is part of the Domestika online course: Dynamic Animal Illustration for Children’s Stories. Learn to draw anthropomorphic characters that bring joy to young readers by exploring the fundamentals of animal anatomy, posing, and stylization.
Partial transcription of the video
“In this lesson, we will learn how to synthesize our intention with a single line. This is like the spine of your animal and we will call it the action line. It will define the whole mood of your subject. you'll get a totally different feeling if your action line is concave or convex, slightly winding or tensed. Now I will sketch two examples with my 2B pencil. This is a fox, for example. Here is the action line. So this one with the concave action line seems pretty happy, confident, wondering. and we will get a totally different feeling with the convex action line. Usually I don't push on m...”
This transcript is automatically generated, so it may contain mistakes.
Course summary for: Dynamic Animal Illustration for Children’s Stories
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Category
Illustration -
Areas
Character Design, Children's Illustration, Drawing, Pencil Drawing
Julie Mellan
A course by Julie Mellan
Julie Mellan is a French illustrator and self-confessed watercolor addict who specializes in illustrations for children’s books. She spent her childhood reading Beatrix Potter’s books and drawing animal characters from Disney movies, before going on to study classic drawing, painting, illustration, and animation at the French art school École Émile Cohl. After graduating, she continued to combine sketching and watercolors to create expressive animal characters, and eventually published her first book in 2013.
Julie uses traditional mediums to tell stories through her illustrations and create connections between characters. Her work has appeared in children’s books published by the likes of Penguin Random House, Clavis, and Fleurus.
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- 14 lessons (1h 58m)
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- Level: Beginner
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