Schoolism – Fundamentals of Expressive Character Design with Wouter Tulp

Character designers are able to visually communicate so much about a character’s personality through designs that are expressive, gestural, and full of life. This course focuses on the fundamentals needed to create expressive characters and will provide you with a skill set with which you are able to create volume, dynamics and expressiveness to your character designs.

The three main topics we’ll focus on throughout the course are shape, volume and gesture, which are the main techniques we’ll use to bring our characters to life, but we will also cover topics like how shapes can affect the dynamics of a design, fundamentals of perspective, understanding 3D space on a 2D surface, and basic body construction. Shape, volume and gesture are analyzed in separate exercises, so we’ll spend ample time on each topic individually to ensure we develop a clear understanding of how these principles work. Along the way, we’ll start combining them to bring simple objects and, ultimately, our characters to life!