Expressive Picture Book Characters is an online art course that teaches simple techniques to draw human and animal characters of all ages. The instructor is Lynne Chapman, a freelance illustrator based in Sheffield, UK. If you are a parent thinking of signing up your child for some fun and interesting art classes, or you might just be keen to learn or improve your basic drawing skills, this is the course for you!

Lynne starts by teaching you how to draw in proportions, applying the same 'snowman shape' as an underlying structure to all human and animal characters in different poses and angles. You will be taught how to humanize your animal characters while still retaining their animal peculiarities. Perhaps you may fancy the idea of dressing up your characters and giving them a range of emotions? Lynne will give you lots of tips and examples on how to do that and bring out personality in your character sketches, while taking note of social norms. You will learn how subtle variations in facial features positioning, can produce dramatic effects on the emotions expressed in your characters, for example; changing a sad face to a scared one or increasing intensity or exaggeration of emotions.

If you are aspiring to come up with a story based on drawing illustrations, you will definitely find this course useful as Lynne teaches you how to make your characters interact with each other, their environment and introduce drama within your sketches. You will learn how to observe and add body language in your characters through different poses. And you will also be taught how to add movement to your characters' body and clothes to create the impression of movement, like walking and running convincingly, and even adding motion to facial expressions.

In this course, Lynne also shares with you how to draw the same characters in different manner to appeal to people of different age groups. And she ends the course with the emphasis on how to use eye contact between your characters to highlight the theme of your illustration, and to inject humor in it.

Enroll in the course or check out more reviews on Craftsy.

Disclosure: This course was provided to me by Craftsy for review purposes. You can support Parka Blogs by using the affiliate links as I get a little commission from each sale. :-)