Motion Design 101 : A Free Kickstart Guide – Michael Jones
Learn to create 2D characters with this 9 week online course. Starting with a foundation in basic draftsmanship and progressing to figure drawing, we will take a multi-week journey in exploring this discipline. Learn the fundamentals of character design and hear from the world’s top character designers at Disney Animation Studio.
Learn From The Best
Bobby is an artist at Disney Animation Studios and studied at Ringling College of Art & Design. He has a solid grasp on the highest standards of character design. This comprehensive course covers everything you need to know to master character design.
Interview series w/ Top Artists
We interviewed a series of Disney artists who gave their take on what makes good character design. Their insight is valuable for designers and animators a like. Including live drawing demo’s from a few of the artists.
Learn Solid Draftsmanship
This course includes a lot of drawing instruction. There is simply no way around the need for solid draftsmanship in a successful character design. Learning to draw is an important part of this process, and this course goes in depth to help you improve your drafting abilities.
What you’ll learn
We’ve broken this massive amount of information into comprehensive modules. Going over the fundamentals needed to master character design takes time. This course is not a live mentorship course, but rather an e-course that will guide you module by module.
Drawing Basics
Welcome to the first module of Mastering Character Design. In the following videos and posts, we will discuss what makes good character design. We will also examine specific technical concepts like perspective, lighting, and drawing exercises.
The goal of the first module is to introduce you to these ideas and get your pencil moving through a series of drawing assignments.
So grab your sketchbook and pencils and let’s get started!
Doing a caricature is a great exercise for character designers. It gives you a human reference as a starting point from which you can exaggerate and emphasize features.
During the production of our interview series we put a few guys on the spot and had some fun. We asked Trent to caricature Bobby. He came up with a great first draft and dropped some great pointers along the way.
Trent’s example shows the need for both solid technical skills and design principles to create appealing designs. In this course, this will be our emphasis. On being solid with our technical skills and starting to master the principles of strong character design.
PLEASE CHECK ALL CONTENTS:
