This focus of this lesson is learning more about the character you yourself have designed. These activities may be done in any order, so feel to do whichever one you want!
ACTIVITY ONE: Character Expressions
Take a piece of paper and fold it into four squares. On the bottom of each square, write a different emotion. For example, Happy, Sad, Angry, Surprised. Then, draw your character making those expressions. If your character is very animated, exaggerate the features. If your characters is more reserved, do not make the expressions too energetic.
Once you have done that, you may choose to either show the same expressions in multiple angles (like a Turn-Around, but for the face), or you can experiment with other emotions.
ACTIVITY TWO: Character Jump Movement
Take a piece of paper and fold it into sections. In each section, draw two horizontal lines. One line will represent the top of head of your characters, the second line will represent the bottom of the "fee". By setting these boundaries, you can make sure that your character stays the same size throughout the whole jump cycle.
- In the first box, draw your character standing naturally.
- In the second box, draw your character crouching.
- In the third box, draw your character mid jump.
The Jump cycle is actually made up of five basic steps (standing, crouching, lift off, landing, standing), but as you may have noticed, the last two steps look similar to the first two frames. This demonstrates an important aspect of animation: repetition. If you have already drawing something once, there is little need to draw it multiple times.
