Next week I’m running a Traditional Animation Workshop in Hawick, so I thought I’d share a little preview from the class.

I’ve always found creating characters to be challenging. Where do I start? And I often find they all end up looking the same. Why is that?

This exercise helps you to think about why you’re drawing what you are.

Draw a simple smiley face. Everything is pretty ordinary: the eyes, nose, and mouth are all evenly spaced and around the same size.

Now, draw a few more circles but don’t yet fill them in. This time instead of drawing the eyes, nose, and mouth all the same size choose one thing to be big, one to be small, and one to be medium. Try drawing a few.

In the examples above you can see how different each face looks as soon as one feature is emphasised.

Once you’re feeling comfortable with the first exercise, try adding more variety. Where on the face are the eyes, nose, mouth? Maybe the eyes are very high on the face, and the mouth is very low. Maybe everything is squashed together, or maybe they’re spread out. Experiment with different styles of eyes and nose and mouth.

Try adding other features, too! Where will the ears sit in relation to the eyes? Will they be close, or far away? How does moving where they are change the character? What does adding hair do?

These same principles can be applied to the rest of the body. Try different shapes, sizes, and combinations of all the above.

If you’ve enjoyed this, consider signing up for my workshop on the 11th of November!