Character Illustration: Drawing Expressive Gestures & Poses in Procreate
Do you love drawing people but struggle with adding personality, expression and story to your character illustrations? This class is for you.
Throughout this class you'll learn how to draw expressive gestures and body language in order to illustrate emotions and relationships with your characters' poses and interactions.
We'll work primarily in digital illustrating tool Procreate, but feel free to follow along with your favourite materials.
We’ll cover:
- How to understand and convey body language through your drawings
- Creating expressive character poses from imagination
- Drawing hand gestures
- Illustrating facial expressions
- Communicating character relationships and interactions
- Illustrating an emotive, stylised scene from start to finish
We’ll kick off with several exercises to practice key techniques, sketching from both imagination and observation to drawing hand gestures and facial expressions. Then we’ll bring all these skills together in our class project to create an emotive illustration with two characters interacting.
This class is for anyone who wants to improve their body language, character interaction and storytelling skills, and is already competent at designing and posing characters. If you’ve taken my previous course, Drawing People: Creating Unique and Dynamic Character Poses in Procreate, then you’ll be able to level up your skills in this class. If you're a beginner then I'd recommend that you take my Drawing People class before this one.
I’ll be using my iPad Pro with Procreate in my demonstrations but you can use whatever software or medium you’re most comfortable drawing with.
When it comes to creating the class project, you'll also need a couple of character designs to draw from, so feel free to use existing designs from your portfolio or create totally new ones for the project.
I look forward to seeing you in class!
Lessons
- Introduction
- Class Overview
- Understanding Body Language
- Exercise: Flour Sacks
- Exercise: Observational Drawing
- Exercise: Facial Expressions
- Exercise: Hand Structure
- Exercise: Hand Gestures
- Exercise: Stick Figure Poses
- Project: Character Designs and Story
- Project: Initial Character Sketches
- Project: Thumbnail Sketches
- Project: Refining the Sketch
- Project: Linework
- Project: Colouring
- Project: Details
- Project: Texture & Final Touches
- Final Thoughts & Thank You
- Bonus: Timelapse Replay
Meet Your Teacher
I'm Sarah, a freelance illustrator based in Scotland. I create playful, narrative based artwork celebrating nature, imagination, and emotion. I graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design with a BDes (honours) in Animation in 2016, and have been freelancing since 2019.
Empowering other creatives to develop their illustration skills is a big part of my work. As a Top Teacher on Skillshare, I’ve helped over 35,000 students level up their practice by sharing my own techniques and processes.
What Students Are Saying
"I found this class (and Sarah's other classes) excellent and I learned something in each lesson, as she guides you through her process." - Nicholas W
"Sarah takes you step by step through her process in this fun class. I really enjoyed it and would highly recommend it to others!" - Cindy S
"Excellent class! I don't even use procreate, but her process and explanation of how to create characters expressions were extremely helpful! Wonderful class and teacher!" - Angela S
"Really enjoyed Sarah's latest teachings. The previous class set a high bar already for quality and provided lots of golden nuggets of knowledge as well. But here she's really outdone herself. The "hand illustration" exercise alone is worth gold!" - Iwan Du P
"I absolutely love this class! Searched for months and months trying to find something helpful on how to draw characters for storyboarding and then this appeared and it's everything I've been desperate to learn. Sarah makes this super easy and fun. Loved seeing how you can give even inanimate objects like sacks such unique stories with a few simple tricks." - Aram A
I hope you enjoy the class! If you have any questions about it, feel free to send me a DM or email hello@sarahhollidayart.com.
Other places to connect:
Subscribe to my newsletter (you'll get my favourite procreate brush as a sign-up gift!)