Animal Character Design for Picture Book Illustrators – Techniques and tips for designing characters with a narrative.

In this class, award-winning picture book illustrator Nina Rycroft shares techniques, tips and tutorials for effective story-driven animal character design. Inspired by Nina's lastest picture book This Is The Dog and her Draw-a-Dog-a-Day 100-Day Project, Nina will walk you through the fundamentals of animal character design.

Nina will be demonstrating a lot the techniques with the help of her dog Valentino, but you're more than welcome to use your own four-legged friend. With a focus on dogs, our besties will help shed light on the fundamentals of animal character design. 

In this class, you will …

• Learn how to move away from reference and closer to your unique style.


• Explore, experiment and design animal characters.


• Sharpen your observation skills.


• Learn how to ‘build’ animals characters using shape, proportion and placement.


• Learn the art of caricature design.


• Learn how to develop and apply a narrative to your animal characters.

In this class, Nina will walk you through... 

• How to distance yourself from ‘copying’ reference by using a three-phase blind drawing exercise.


• An observational drawing exercise, drawing the front view and ¾ view.


• The essentials in caricature design


• A mind-mapping process – brainstorming ideas for an animal character design with a narrative


• Sketching ideas – in a series of thumbnails sketches


• Designing and drawing your final animal character illustrations


• Adding colour, texture and shadow

Whether you’re creating character design concepts for a book, a comic or a series of greeting cards, what you learn in this class can be applied to any animal character.