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Animal Character Design with David Colman
Creature Art Teacher Course
Create animal characters filled with personality, appeal, and story.
Join David Colman for an in-depth course on animal character design.
You’ll learn how to combine anatomy, gesture, storytelling, shape language, and expression to create memorable animal characters for animation, illustration, and visual storytelling.
Animal Design
Character Development
Storytelling
With David Colman
Character Development
Storytelling
With David Colman
What You’ll Learn
Explore how anatomy, gesture, shape design, and expression work together to create believable and appealing animal characters.
Character & Story
Learn how to design characters that communicate personality, emotion, attitude, and narrative through strong visual choices.
Course Journey
Follow David through demonstrations, design exercises, and practical workflows that help bring animal characters to life.
Meet David Colman
Learn from Emmy Award-winning story artist, character designer, and renowned animal artist David Colman.
Lessons
01 Tiger Studies and Shape Exploration
Understand your character, get reference pictures and a lot of rough drawing to explore the shapes your character needs.
02 Gorilla Shape Breakdown
Keep sketching to breaking down shapes and achieve iconic recognizability in your characters.
03 Crow Studies
Observe a study of a crow to identify the characteristic shapes that differentiate them from other birds.
04 Tiger and Gorilla Bodies Shape Design
Go through the design phase of your character’s body to better know their anatomy.
05 Tiger Designs
Continue with the exploration faze using the most necessary and appealing forms while keeping in mind who your character is.
06 Final Tiger Designs
David guides you to synthesize forms, maintaining patterns in silhouettes, volumes and contrast on your character.
07 Pose Thumbnails Part 1
Implement this exercise to unlock creativity and apply your study to the basic shapes of the character.
08 Pose Thumbnails Part 2
Continue the thumbnail exercise keeping a sense of harmony and thinking in a three-dimensional character.
09 Gorilla Character Design in Color
Learn the criteria for selecting the best shape from the previous excersice and work thoroughly in styling and coloring.
10 Crow Characters
Apply your previous crow studies to get quick character designs.
11 Fox Studies Shape Exploration
David shows you a quick shape break down for a fox study, in preparation for the next exercise.
12 Drawing a Cute Fox
Start the exploration phase learning the proportions, parameters and references to obtain a cute character.
13 Bonus: Fox Supplemental
See the cute fox result, summarizing elements from previous lessons. Share your character design with #LearningFromDavid #CreatureArtTeacher
