online course focusing on
FUNDAMENTAL DRAWING SKILLS REQUIRED FOR WORKING
​IN ANIMATION OR ILLUSTRATION

If your drawing style is heavily influenced by animation or illustration and you are looking to improve your skills to prepare for a career in either industry, this fundamental drawing class will strengthen your drawing skills for your own animation, illustration or comics projects.
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The first lesson: How to draw a perfect circle.
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How to self-correct when drawing a circle.
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Demonstrating a perfect circle.
Becoming a strong artist requires the strengthening of fundamental drawing skills. Once students learn how to draw a perfect circle and a straight line, we move from improving draftsmanship to creating 3 Dimensional form. These forms are the structures we use in the basics of figurative drawing. Understanding proportion, and constructing the figure allows students to build their own characters from reference and from imagination. Understanding the dynamics of movement and action gives students the ability to create fluid and rhythmic characters.
The basics of figure drawing will transition us into drawing character designs for animation and narrative story telling. We'll focus on key principles of design and discuss the use of shape language in creating strong characters with identifiable personalities. 
Lastly, we'll focus on creating compelling story scenes by combining characters with backgrounds. Understanding the basics of perspective and constructing characters is imperative to create believable environmental scenes with grounded characters. We'll focus on character layout and the basics of world building.  Lastly, we'll discuss designing appealing compositions, and the basics of rendering light and shadow in an environment for a final illustration project.
This class is for beginner and intermediate students and was developed as a college portfolio preparation course for Laguna College of Art + Design taught at the Chuck Jones Center of Creativity.
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Required Materials List:
  • Sketchbook, no smaller than 9" x 12"
  • Drawing Pencils and a Kneaded eraser and Regular eraser
  • Black pens (either a sharpie/brush pen/micron pen or something comparable)
  • Blue Col-Erase colored pencils for drawing character layouts and perspective drawings
  • Optional - Colored media (colored pencils, watercolors) for the final illustration assignment
  • Optional - If you are comfortable using a Digital Painting Program such as Clip Studio Paint, Photoshop, Procreate, Autodesk Sketchbook, Ibis Paint, Alpaca or any other digital painting program, work can be done digitally
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From "Eggnapped! Easter with the Wild Thornberrys" published by Simon Spotlight