Lesson 3: The Six Key Elements of Animal Character Design
Beginner’s Guide to Animal Character Design
Welcome to Lesson 3 of the Beginner’s Guide to Animal Character Design!
Today’s Task: In this lesson, we will animate our crocodile, hippo, and flamingo characters.
The Six Key Elements
When designing and illustrating animal characters for picture books, it’s important to be able to animate them and move them through the story. This requires understanding how to pose and animate your animal characters while keeping their appearance consistent.
In this lesson, I will show you how to break the body down into six key elements: the head, the neck, the front legs and shoulders, the body, the rear legs and hips, and the tail. By adjusting, rotating, and repositioning these parts, you can create any pose you need.
While we’ll focus on this process for four-legged animals, I will also show how it can be applied to a two-legged bird.
What You Will Need:
- Paper and a pencil, with the option to use your iPad
- A sheet of tracing paper
Happy Sketching!
Nina
PS – Share your animal characters with me on Instagram @ninarycroft characters! #drawwithnina!
Nina Rycroft
Picture Book Illustrator : Instructor
I’ve been illustrating picture books since my first publication back in 2000. Follow along as I share tips and techniques that will have you drawing animal characters in a few simple steps. If you like what you see, make sure to check out my online courses.
