15 Drawing Exercises to Improve your Character Designs!
In this video we are going to give you 15 Drawing Exercises to Improve your Character Designs, by making your drawings confident, EXPRESSIVE, and with more 3-dimensional form. Today we are going to cover the following. Here are are a few of the topics we cover in the video.
Straight Lines
Fill a page with perfectly straight parallel lines. Try not to let them touch. Do this in one quick motion for line confidence. This is a warmup for your shoulder. Next draw them perpendicular to make a grid. For an added challenge…make two random dots on the paper and try to connect the two dots with a line…You can even practice the motion a couple times above the paper before you make your mark.
Gradients
Create a gradient by quickly moving your pencil or pen back and forth and down. Try to make a rectangle shape. This is an exercise of control over pen or pencil pressure. Don’t just draw one shade, or distribute the tone unevenly at the end. You’re gonna wanna create a smooth, even gradient, like a computer. By shading within a confined space, you practice edge control, Being able to master hard and soft edges will be the key to realistic shading and lighting.
Gesture Drawing
Gesture is the first step in drawing figures and it is a loose expressive sketch, that captures a character’s direction and purpose. Gesture drawings are great because they are expressive foundational drawings that have lots of energy and are drawn very quickly.
Line of Action
Your first step is to find the “line of action”…one long expressive line that shows the core action of the character. Make this line, and then add the head, arms, legs, body or any other details you have time for.
Cube Rotation
Try drawing cubes from various angles so you can really understand how these planar surfaces move away from you. I’d tell you more about it, but it’s honestly pretty straightforward, just try to avoid making impossible cubes with an inverse perspective, keep them all believable
Blob heads
Lightly sketch a lot of blobs on a paper like this: now turn each of them into a person’s head in profile. This is an exercise in shape design and creativity. Don’t try to be too technical with this one…faces are pretty diverse, and the more you push some of these the more personality you will get from the character. Because your space is limited, you should fill every inch of the paper with a face. This will allow you to find creative solutions and happy accidents for all the weird spaces in between.
Lets Redraw Some Characters
Maya sent in this drawing and my main critique is that this pose could be pushed so much further. I’m going to do some gesture experiments to push this pose. And get this line of action much stronger. I didn’t do this just once, I filled up an entire page of possibilities,
Kenny Cooper sent us this one, and I can see that they’re trying to go for something somewhat realistically stylized.
But I feel that it’s somewhat stiff and these details here don’t quite show the volume. I’m going to trace the character using tubes and spheres and try to find the forms. If we change these lines here we can improve how this character exists in 3d space
What about something really stylized? This drawing by Hannah Isaiah is excellent. But the shapes could be pushed so much further, I want to experiment with new head and body shapes. Remember the exercise where we tried fitting faces into blobs. Let’s use that here to create something really iconic, something with a strong silhouette that is much more pushed.
Be Sure to check out the whole video on our Youtube channel!