#FREE Sharon Ross: Character Designer for 2D Animation #3D + Animation #Sharon Ross

Want to know what it’s like to design characters for one of today’s most popular animated TV shows? In this interview, Sharon Ross explains how she went from art student to illustrator to character designer for Family Guy. Sharon gives aspiring animators insights into the responsibilities of 2D character designers, from concept art and turnarounds to mouth charts and expression pages, and reveals what she studied (illustration), where she got her first job (Klasky Csupo), what she does to stay current on evolving technology such as Photoshop, and how she finds inspiration.

LEVEL –  Appropriate for all

COURSE TOPICS:

READ MORE

LEARN THIS COURSE FOR FREE *10 days of free unlimited access to “Sharon Ross: Character Designer for 2D Animation”

Instructor’s Welcome Note:

– I’m Sharon Ross. I’m a Character Designer and that means I do the visual representation of a character from a story. Hopefully you get an idea of the sense of who he is from how he looks, like age, sex and physical attitude, things like that, but also personality traits and things like that. So we start from the script and then, with input from the director, we do designs before the storyboards usually and then after that’s done we end up doing turnarounds of the character so that you can see them from all angles, so the animators know exactly what they’re going to look like.
So for that show we do a lot of incidental characters, caricatures of celebrities and things like that. You have to do the turnarounds like I said. We do mouth charts for lip sync, Sometimes construction pages and expression pages, and of course that’s, you know, coming from a 2D standpoint. Sometimes you have to do fuller turnarounds if they have more action or if it’s for feature production. Also special poses and that’s a big one on Family Guy because a lot of times we have characters who are, well, just changed their clothes or get deformed in some way, like Peter dressed in a nice outfit and his hair up like Julia Roberts on Pretty Woman, or like Brian when he’s dead and run over.
Sometimes like their arm’s cut off so then you have to design it from the bone out with the blood and all and that’s really common on our show (chuckles). My first job in animation was at Klasky Csupo. I worked on Aaahh!!! Real Monsters which was really fun. It was a good place to start because they were quick to hire to inexperienced people at that time and you could work with the more experienced and very talented animators they had there. On my first day there, an award-winning animation director, although I didn’t know it at the time, asked me if I knew how to turn characters and I said, “Yeah sure,” and then I had to go back to my seat and quickly learn how to do that by looking at all the stuff that they had there, they’d done in the past, and that’s not really the way I’d recommend doing it, but that’s how it happens sometimes.
I do a lot of freelance and a lot of that involves Family Guy, promotional artwork for magazines and articles, mobile games, things like that. And I’ve done a lot of products, books, greeting cards over the years, but my main focus right now is children’s books, children’s picture books. I’m working with an author right now and I really like that. It’s especially great because I get to be involved in the story part of it. I enjoy the complete freedom in developing the style in which I want to work and I’m really enjoying that.
For me that kind of started way back, my first job out of college was at Hallmark Cards and as a person from a small town in Kansas, it was kind of the most immediate opportunity, and a lot of the projects there involved licensed characters so that led me to my job at Disney. There it was very important for me to learn how to draw in the Disney style and keep the characters consistent. So that’s a very important part of animation, so that helped me transition into animation.
I studied illustration, my BFA was Visual Communications with an emphasis in illustration. We studied color and layout and graphic design, that sort of thing, and the basic drawing skills, which is really important. I went directly to Hallmark. That’s where the illustration came in handy. And, oh, there I worked on a lot of licensed characters so that led me to my Disney job, and in that job it was very important for me to learn to draw within the Disney style and keep the characters consistent.
Well, my friends who are teachers tell me that they’re stressing basic drawings skills so I think that’s covered but that is definitely a very important one because you kind of need that in almost anything you do in animation. Sometimes I see that they’re not quite focusing on that as much, maybe as it has been in the past, but the thing that I think

 

 

Get 10 days of FREE unlimited access to Lynda.com.

Sharon Ross: Character Designer for 2D Animation
Animation Tutorials
tutorials
Lynda review

from Course reviews, freebies, coupons http://www.coursetag.com/free-sharon-ross-character-designer-for-2d-animation-3d-animation-sharon-ross/