Character Design for Animation: Design and Craft Memorable Personalities

Unleash your inner character designer and craft visually appealing and relatable characters that captivate your viewers. 

Stepping into a world of dragons, trolls, and talking dogs is just an average day for animator and story artist, Toniko Pantoja. Over the past decade, Toniko has spent countless hours developing captivating characters, directing animated shorts, and collaborating on blockbusters like How to Train your Dragon 3, Trolls, and Croods 2. Toniko’s technical precision and unique animation style has captivated millions of viewers helping him build  a community of over 335K on YouTube and Instagram. 

In this class, Toniko draws from both his personal and professional experience to help any animation enthusiast craft interesting and dynamic characters. With Toniko by your side, you’ll build visually appealing, relatable, and realistic characters that can fit into any personal animation project or even a project idea pitch.

With Toniko’s actionable and candid teaching style, you’ll learn how to:

• Find helpful character references to inspire unique and interesting personas
• Explore different visual versions of your character and how they fit into your story
• Represent your story through your character’s emotions, attitude and personality
• Develop interesting character dynamics through contrasting personas
• Dive into realistic character posing and emotion to create a more believable story

Plus, get a look into some of Toniko’s previous characters and how he used posing and emotion to better communicate their story. 

Whether you’re building a full blown animation pitch or are exploring character development for the first time, this class will help you come up with new characters who can fit into any story or animation project. 

Basic animation knowledge and illustration skills will help streamline your learning process in this class. To follow along with Toniko, you’ll need a computer, Adobe Animate, and a drawing or graphics tablet. If you don’t have a tablet, you can also draw within Adobe Animate using a mouse. To continue your animation journey, explore Toniko’s full Animation Learning Path.