Out of Shape: Character Design and Storytelling Through Posing
Design expressive, story-rich characters by mastering shape language, contrast, and dynamic posing in this 6-week course.
Bring Your Characters to Life Through Shape, Story, and Visual Contrast
In this 6-week course, students will learn a fun and approachable method to designing characters with an emphasis on storytelling. It all starts with simple and easy to draw shapes. Students will learn how to push and exaggerate those shapes to create contrast, variety, and interest in each design. Line of action, size, and shape variation all help to make characters feel unique and captivating. Learn how those relationships within the character, and between characters, can create a character moment that pushes tension, drama, or humor.
Three shapes. Endless possibilities.
Drawing by Tim Ingersoll
This course uses a layered approach so that students can focus on one element at a time. This easy to use formula will help students feel much more creative and successful as they develop these skills.
These skills can be used to rapidly design new characters, create storyboard beats, or help plan out animation thumbnails. Whether you’re just starting out, have been drawing for a while, or just have a deep love of animation you’ll be able to take the skills learned in this course to push your art forward.
6-WEEK COURSE
$899 USD
Pro Artists Mentor You to Be Successful
Our character design and storytelling course allows you to learn, practice, and get 1:1 feedback and reviews from our mentors. You will have the chance to learn from them in live conversations as they share insights about what studios are working on and what qualities they look for in an visual artist. Our mentors will work directly with you to grow and improve your skills.
Tim Ingersoll
Animator
DreamWorks Animation
Tim Ingersoll has been a professional animator since 1987 and is currently an animator at DreamWorks Animation. He is a classically trained 2D animator and has worked on films including The Little Mermaid and The Road to El Dorado. A fun fact about Tim is that he went on the Newlywed Game and won the grand prize! He currently teaches Animation Basics, the first Core Character Animation Course at Animation Mentor.
Sign Up for Our Waiting List
Sign up for our waiting list and we'll notify you when more seats are available or when the next registration opens.
Choose Your Class
Review available mentors and Q&A times. All Q&A times shown in Pacific time.
1-on-1 Feedback from a Studio Pro
During this 6-week course, you’ll have live Q&As with your mentor each week in addition to receiving an assignment designed to develop your skills in character design and storytelling. Plus, your mentor will review and critique each of your assignments and provide you with a video of their feedback so you can improve your work. This is a project based learning experience, where each week you’ll have a specific assignment to help develop and explore key learning goals.
Design Characters That Tell a Story
Character design starts with simple shapes – but great design goes further by using contrast, exaggeration, and storytelling to make characters feel truly alive. In this 6-week course, you’ll learn how to push shapes, explore size variation, and build strong visual relationships that convey personality, drama, and humor. Whether you’re designing for animation, storyboarding, or your own creative projects, you’ll develop an easy-to-follow, layered approach that helps you create characters that are not just appealing, but unforgettable.
What You’ll Learn in this Course
SESSION 01
The Blank Page
Starting with the blank page (or screen!) can be intimidating. We’ll focus first on the big picture and see how we can create guidelines to help us make decisions faster.
SESSION 02
Contrast and Exaggeration
Each character design should have contrast within it, and each character on screen should feel different than the next. This session will focus on how to compare and contrast different elements of a design (or designs!) to help avoid repetitive decision making.
SESSION 03
Clarity and Readability
Balancing complex shapes for interest, versus simple silhouettes for readability is a constant juggling act, but very important for every character design. This session will focus on tools and techniques to help balance those elements together.
SESSION 04
Characters with History
Bringing storytelling into the character design process leads to more interesting and appealing designs. This session will analyze different emotions and the ways those can be incorporated into the character design.
SESSION 05
Tying it all Together
This session will focus on how to work from general to specific to help block out an idea quickly. In addition ideas around how to use and incorporate props into the design and storytelling process will be explored.
SESSION 06
Just Keep Drawing
This final session will focus on how to keep building on everything covered in this course.
Course Requirements
Course Details
LIVE Q&As | A Total of Six One Hour Q&As
ASSIGNMENTS | 5 Character Design Exercises
SOFTWARE | Drawing software for assignments (Procreate, Clip Studio Paint, Adobe Photoshop, or equivalent software). Students may work traditionally if desired, but must be able to photograph or scan assignments.
HARDWARE | Meet Minimum Requirements
AGE | 18 Years or Older
LANGUAGE | English
Skills You Need Before You Start
This course is open to students with basic drawing skills but is not graded so that you feel comfortable learning the concepts at your own pace. It’s a good fit for animators wanting to improve their storytelling through posing and anyone interested in a career in concept art or visual development.
What You’ll Learn
Whether you’re a budding character designer, an animator looking to improve your thumbnails, or a storyteller hoping to bring your ideas to life, this course will give you the tools and confidence to design expressive, story-driven characters from the ground up.
Through shape exploration, visual contrast, and a layered design process, you’ll build skills that can be applied across animation, storyboarding, illustration, comics, games, and more.
By the end of the course, you’ll walk away with:
- A stronger ability to create characters that feel alive and unique through shape, size, and contrast
- An understanding of how to use line of action and silhouette for clarity, emotion, and impact
- A reliable design process to move from rough ideas to refined characters
- The ability to design relationships between characters that support story, tension, drama, or humor
- Foundational skills for rapid ideation, visual storytelling, and thumbnailing for animation
- A clear method for using reference materials to inspire fresh, specific designs
- More confidence in your creative voice and visual storytelling instincts
Related Courses
If you are interested in character design, you might be interested in these workshops as well.
Introduction to Character Design
6-Week course
Learn the fundamentals of character design.
Visual Development:
Principles of Design
6-Week COURSE
Design appealing characters using shape language and color theory.
Story I: Storyboarding
Fundamentals
6-Week COURSE
Sophisticate your storyboarding craft and add core skills & techniques to your tool box.