Skillshare Classes

Here's a collection of courses I've created for Skillshare. They're composed of individual video lessons leading up to a fun course assignment that makes use of the course's primary concepts. You can take them any time at your own pace!

Shape Language

This class explores the importance of shapes in character design, and it will teach you to use them intelligently in your own creations! Through a series of hands on exercises and studies of various characters in fiction, we'll expand our knowledge of shapes and how to read them.

Color

This course is about figuring out the "why" of color in regards to character design. We'll begin by exploring some basic ideas on color theory, and transition into how those colors are integrated purposefully into characters from video games, movies, cartoons, comics, and any other fantasy medium you can think of. Color can be a scary, complicated thing to learn at a glance, but the idea is to make it not so complicated, so that anyone can be confident in the palettes they choose for their own made up characters.

Proportion

This course is about proportion and learning how this element of character design is used to emphasize or downplay certain features. We'll be exploring various well-known characters and examining why they are built the way they are, as well as doing some drawing exercises of our own to understand the importance of space on a character.

Line Quality

This course will teach you just how lines are used to breathe life into fantasy character designs. You might use a line to scribble a smile onto a character -- or you might use it to give them a leaping motion in a still drawing. You can even use lines to give flat drawings the illusion of 3 dimensions! We'll take a look at the lines of well-known characters from various media, and we'll even consider lines that exist in the real world to gain an understanding of why they work the way they do.

Visual Density

This course explores the reasons why some characters are heavily detailed with realism in mind, while others are deliberately abstracted to as few details as possible. The concepts will teach you to focus on communicating important visual information in your own characters, and how an adjective-noun-verb formula can help you build them from the ground up.