Students discover their creative voices through an engaging character-design process that combines drawing, storytelling, and digital tools.

Rachel Wintemberg

I look back on myself as an awkward, clumsy fourth grader with no athletic ability. My cartoon drawings were my one claim to fame. Sure, I was always the last child picked for kickball, but if the group project involved drawing, everyone wanted me on their team. I would have been devastated if an art teacher told me that my copying was “wrong.” In fact, parroting other artists was an important step in my creative development. I don’t remember exactly how I learned to integrate the skills I developed by copying into my original artwork. It just happened organically, the more I drew.

Flash-forward to today. As a high school computer animation teacher, it’s always a challenge to help my students find their unique voices and become creators of original art. Recently, I started with inspiration from this art lesson: Animation Design Challenge: Character Sheets.

First, I demonstrated the technique of drawing a silhouette with a broad-tipped permanent marker. I didnʼt create any outlines. Instead, I filled in areas to form shapes.

My students had previously practiced human proportion and gesture drawing, so I reminded them that a character can express personality simply by the way it’s standing.

Now it was their turn. Their artwork did not need to be human; animals, imaginary beings, and extraterrestrials were all fine. I encouraged experimentation without preconceived notions. We looked at my sloppy silhouette drawings and guessed each character’s traits. Were we seeing a giant hat or an elaborate hairdo? An old woman or a young space creature? We had previously animated facial expressions, so students knew how to squash, stretch, and exaggerate a drawing to express mood and personality. Our skills came together as we experimentally scribbled our forms.

The next day, we taped tracing paper over the silhouettes and began to draw in pencil. I asked students to turn and talk and imagine possibilities for each other’s drawings before developing one idea. Once the characters emerged, I brought students back to my demo table for a lesson on cross-hatching using fine-tipped ink pens and reminded them of the animation principle of solid drawing.

Professional animators use the concept of solid drawing to bring their cartoons to life. A circle becomes a sphere. A rectangle becomes a cylinder. I demonstrated this concept by drawing on the side of a coffee can. By drawing curved lines and lifting the fine-tipped pen slightly at the end of each stroke, students were able to explore not only volume and shadow, but the textures of clothing, hair, skin, and fur. As their artwork developed, expressive original beings began to emerge.

Finally, it was time to add color. We flipped our tracing paper over and used alcohol-based markers and colorless blenders on the back to bring each personality to life. Using this method saved us from accidentally obliterating carefully rendered details. Adding color to the flipped side of a transparent surface harks back to the way animators painstakingly painted on the back of celluloid film during the golden age of animation. It also pays homage to the way color is added to digital drawings today in the layers below the lines.

Some of the colors appeared too faded, so we flipped our papers back to the front and carefully added more color and texture using high-quality soft-core pencils. Having color on both the front and back of the tracing paper gave our pieces a multidimensional feel.

At this point, we scanned our work, digitally removed the background, and students made minor image adjustments using Photoshop.

At last, it was time to name our characters, tell their backstories, and describe their personalities. We wrote a paragraph for each of the three main characters in our stories. When writing about a protagonist, sage, or sidekick, I instructed the class to select two positive traits and one negative trait from this list. For a villain or foil, they were to select two negative traits and one positive trait.

Our next step will be to create settings for our characters so we can start animating. In the past, I have had students follow up by creating animatics, paper cut-out animations, and graphic novels using multimedia approaches that involve both traditional and digital resources. Finished products have included student-made films, printed books, and ebooks.

Once characters are developed, they tend to take on a life of their own. Their faults and flaws drive the story while their best qualities inspire us to root for them. Most importantly, this assignment helps students to see themselves as artists and writers with unique points of view and original ideas worth sharing.

Rachel Wintemberg teaches computer animation at Perth Amboy High School in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and is a contributing editor for SchoolArts. rachelhw1966@gmail.com

Encouraging Originality through Character Design