Animal Character Design for Picture Book Illustrators with Nina Rycroft — SkillShare — Free download

Animal Character Design for Picture Book Illustrators – Techniques and tips for designing characters with a narrative.

In this class, award-winning picture book illustrator Nina Rycroft shares techniques, tips and tutorials for effective story-driven animal character design. Inspired by Nina’s lastest picture book This Is The Dog and her Draw-a-Dog-a-Day 100-Day Project, Nina will walk you through the fundamentals of animal character design.

Nina will be demonstrating a lot the techniques with the help of her dog Valentino, but you’re more than welcome to use your own four-legged friend. With a focus on dogs, our besties will help shed light on the fundamentals of animal character design.

In this class, you will …

• Learn how to move away from reference and closer to your unique style.
• Explore, experiment and design animal characters.
• Sharpen your observation skills.
• Learn how to ‘build’ animals characters using shape, proportion and placement.
• Learn the art of caricature design.
• Learn how to develop and apply a narrative to your animal characters.

In this class, Nina will walk you through…

• How to distance yourself from ‘copying’ reference by using a three-phase blind drawing exercise.
• An observational drawing exercise, drawing the front view and ¾ view.
• The essentials in caricature design
• A mind-mapping process – brainstorming ideas for an animal character design with a narrative
• Sketching ideas – in a series of thumbnails sketches
• Designing and drawing your final animal character illustrations
• Adding colour, texture and shadow

Whether you’re creating character design concepts for a book, a comic or a series of greeting cards, what you learn in this class can be applied to any animal character.

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Course Content: https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Animal-Character-Design-for-Picture-Book-Illustrators/1001506685