Cartoon Character Design from Zero

In this course you’ll learn everything you need to draw and render awesome and appealing cartoon characters from the ground up. I’ll assume you know next to nothing regarding how to draw, or how to use any digital illustration software.

This course will be basically divided into two parts, the first and most important part of the course will be all about how to draw and design cartoon characters. And the second part will deal with the rendering of those characters, that is, how to finish them on a digital illustration software, by adding final line, color, and light and shadow.

First, we’ll start learning how to draw the characters with the head unit. This unit is will laser focus on how to draw the head. I believe the head is complex enough that warrant its own unit, plus is a fairly self-contained part of the body, if you master it, you have half of the design in the bag!. Anyway, this unit will start with the shape of the head, and the techniques you can use to help you design attractive heads super fast without the need for detail. From there we’ll move on to the actual head features, I’ll show you a large quantity of the most commonly used eyes, noses, mouths and more. I’ve left you a downloadable PDF file with all the features for you to use as reference. By the end of this unit, if you make all the exercises, you should be able to come up knowing how to make full appealing cartoon heads.

The next unit is about the rest of the body. We’ll start introducing the concept of the mannequin. A really helpful tool to draw and design cartoon bodies from imagination. In this lesson you’ll all learn a bit of the super simplified human anatomy, or at least, the basic shapes of the body. My idea is that if you learn those super simplified shapes, you can design those more anatomically inspired cartoons (think of the characters from Avatar, or any other show inspired by Anime with semi-realistic bodies) rather than being limited by your knowledge to only create those super abstract type of cartoons. There’s also a PDF for the diagram of the body. The unit finishes up by putting those mannequins in motion and dressing them up. By the end of this unit, you should be able to draw and design any type of cartoon character with any type of body in movement.

Then we continue with a unit where I’ll be demonstrating how to put in practice everything I’ve shown you to this point, by making five quick commentated sketches.

Then the second part of this course starts with the Inkscape unit. Inkscape is a free, open source, vector illustration software, this means that you work differently than you do in a traditional pixel based software like Photoshop. In inkscape you work with a normal, everyday keyboard and mouse, which means that you dont need a drawing tablet to render your characters into beautiful illustration. Anyway, in this unit I’ve left you an entire mini-course that goes fairly in-depth into the program basics, while being super condensed into 4 lessons. From there the unit moves into more specific lessons regarding tracing and rendering sketches. By the end of this unit, you should come up knowing the tools and techniques to render a simple sketch, into a beautifully finished illustration.

In the final rendering unit I’ll import those sketches i made earlier to Inkscape, and I’ll demonstrate how to apply everything from the Inkscape unit.

I should also mention that at the end of almost every lesson, i put a list of exercises that will help you master everything you’ve seen in the video. Don’t forget to make them all!.

This course is gonna be lots and lots of fun. So if you want to learn how to draw and design cartoons, or maybe if you already know how to draw but want to learn how to use Inkscape for rendering your sketches, then i think this course is gonna be for you.

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