Character Illustration: Drawing Expressive Gestures & Poses in Procreate

If you love drawing people but struggle with adding personality, expression and story to your character illustrations, this class is for you! Throughout this class you'll learn how to draw expressive gestures and body language in order to illustrate emotions and relationships with your characters' poses and interactions.

We'll work primarily in digital illustrating tool Procreate, but feel free to follow along with your favourite materials.

Throughout the class we’ll cover:

• How to understand and convey body language through your drawings
• Creating expressive character poses from imagination
• Drawing hand gestures
• Illustrating facial expressions
• Communicating character relationships and interactions
• Illustrating an emotive, stylised scene from start to finish

We’ll kick off with several exercises to practice key techniques, sketching from both imagination and observation to drawing hand gestures and facial expressions. Then we’ll bring all these skills together in our class project to create an emotive illustration with two characters interacting.

This class is for anyone who wants to improve their body language, character interaction and storytelling skills, and is already competent at designing and posing characters. If you’ve taken my previous course, Drawing People: Creating Unique and Dynamic Character Poses in Procreate, then you’ll be able to level up your skills in this class. If you are a beginner then I would recommend that you take my Drawing People class before this one.

I’ll be using my iPad Pro with Procreate in my demonstrations but you can use whatever software or medium you’re most comfortable drawing with.

When it comes to creating the class project, you'll also need a couple of character designs to draw from, so feel free to use existing designs from your portfolio or create totally new ones for the project.

I look forward to seeing you in class!

___________________

Want to brush up on your character illustration basics? Check out my beginner friendly Drawing People class here:

Special thanks to Di Ujdi for her guidance and support throughout the making of this class.

• Introduction
• Class Overview
• Understanding Body Language
• Exercise: Flour Sacks
• Exercise: Observational Drawing
• Exercise: Facial Expressions
• Exercise: Hand Structure
• Exercise: Hand Gestures
• Exercise: Stick Figure Poses
• Project: Character Designs and Story
• Project: Initial Character Sketches
• Project: Thumbnail Sketches
• Project: Refining The Sketch
• Project: Linework
• Project: Colouring
• Project: Details
• Project: Texture & Final Touches
• Final Thoughts & Thank You
• Bonus: Timelapse Replay