From the course: Learning Character Development and Design

Welcome

From the course: Learning Character Development and Design

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Welcome

“

- Hi, I'm Mary Jane Begin, illustrator, author, and professor at Rhode Island School of Design. As an illustrator, I've discovered that most of my best ideas, stories, and images start with story-telling, and the stories always seem to start with the characters. Developing good characters for any kind of project, designing a cast of characters for animation, superheroes for comics, or lovable personalities for books all require insight into character development. In this course, I'm going to show you how to get to the heart and soul of the character, and demonstrate the methods for bringing it to life through exploration in things like body shape, posture, facial expression, proportion, color, movement, developing backstory, examining archetypes, and reviewing the kinds of famous characters, humanoid or beast, who captured our hearts. To help you sharpen your own skills at designing characters, I'm going to bounce between several of my book projects as well as share some of the work from a star-studded cast of illustrators from all corners of the marketplace. Your character ideas are waiting to come to life, so grab a pencil and let's get started.

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