CE-HSPA-1020 - Illustrations and Character Design
Course Description
Learning how to design realistic, engaging characters can help you bring your illustrations to the next level. Illustration and Character Design will help you learn how to develop a character with a backstory, unique traits, and depth that you can use to create many more characters and stories beyond the week you’ll spend on the RIT campus. You’ll learn from industry professionals how to develop your characters to bring them to life and even create your own short comic using the character you’ll develop in this course.
Is This Course For You?
Are you a rising high school sophomore, junior, or senior interested in creating your own unique characters? Are you interested in learning more about the world of illustration and creating your own short comic? This Illustration and Character Design course is the perfect way to immerse yourself in the world of illustration and get an idea of how to develop illustrations of your own unique and in-depth characters.
What You’ll Learn
In this course, you’ll dive into the world of character illustration and learn how to portray emotion, relationships, and storytelling through your character drawings. Learning the art of illustration is about learning how to simplify the human form to establish gestures, balance, and gravity in your drawings, which you’ll cover in this course. You’ll also learn how to create visual flow, progression, and variety to enhance the narrative of your story and the design of your scene as well as how to illustrate body language that conveys the emotions of your characters.
You’ll learn how to create a set of related characters and create a short comic using those characters. In your comic, you’ll work on how to communicate a narrative story nonverbally and portray the storyline using only your visuals. While developing your characters you’ll also learn about character archetypes and how you can use them to further your story and the development of your characters.
How You’ll Learn
Throughout this five day course, you’ll learn how to develop and draw unique characters. You’ll brainstorm ideas and focus on one character of your own creation for a majority of the week, diving into expression, composition, and more. Using your character, you will also outline and create a simple comic in the form of a six page zine. By the end of the week, you’ll have completed a full size character sheet with your design.
Aside from the hands-on experience of creating and drawing your characters, you’ll also learn from media demonstrations and visual presentations from illustrators in the field. You’ll also get to work on your characters and test out the new skills you’re learning using RIT’s state-of-the art studios and workshops.
Skills You Walk Away With
By the end of your weeklong course, you will:
- Be able to construct a visual narrative
- Have a narrative piece of work and 3 fully fleshed out characters that can be used in other pieces of work
- Have the ability to create realistic characters
- Be able to create rhythm and variation in a composition
- Know how to simplify human form and how to establish gestures, balance, and gravity as it effects figure