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Catalog
Animation Concept Design
Design for movement: model sheets, expression and pose libraries, colour scripts, and keeping a character consistent across every shot.
Select Your Level
This level is for artists designing characters that other people will have to redraw hundreds of times. This single constraint changes everything about what makes a design good: a beautiful, intricate character that takes an hour to draw accurately is a bad design for animation regardless of how it looks on a single sheet. Simplicity is not a compromise here but a requirement.
By the end of this level you can design a character that is simple enough to redraw repeatedly and still recognisable at a glance. You can strip a design back to its essential shapes without it becoming generic, and you can produce a model sheet that another artist can work from. You are designing for reproduction rather than for a single impressive drawing.
What You'll Learn
- You work through simplifying shapes without losing personality, which is the central skill of the discipline, and construction that holds up when a character is drawn from any angle
- The material covers basic model sheets that communicate a design to others, maintaining consistent proportions across many drawings, and understanding why complexity translates directly into production time and cost
This level covers producing the complete package a production actually needs. A single well-drawn character sheet is not enough: a production requires every angle, every expression, every colour variation and every prop, documented clearly enough that a team can work from it without interrupting you. The deliverable is a specification, and its completeness is what determines whether the design survives contact with production.
By the end of this level you can deliver a complete design package that lets someone else draw the character correctly without asking you a single question. You can anticipate the situations a production will encounter and document them in advance, and you can keep colour consistent across varied lighting. Your work becomes genuinely usable by a team rather than only by you.
What You'll Learn
- The material covers turnarounds and construction guides that let anyone reconstruct the character, expression sheets that fix how the face deforms, and pose and action libraries that establish how the character carries themselves
- It works through colour models including night and special lighting conditions, and prop and costume breakdowns so that accessories stay consistent wherever they appear
This level moves from designing a character to holding a look across a whole production. Individually strong designs can still fail as an ensemble, and a sequence can lose its mood because colour was decided shot by shot rather than planned across the whole. The concern here is coherence at the scale of a project, where consistency matters more than any single striking image.
By the end of this level you can keep a consistent look across an entire cast and sequence, and plan how mood shifts from scene to scene rather than discovering it in the edit. You can make a cast that separates clearly, and you can design to the constraints you actually have. You are shaping the appearance of a whole piece rather than contributing parts to it.
What You'll Learn
- You work through colour scripts that map mood across an entire sequence before any shot is finished, and ensemble design where silhouette separation keeps a cast distinguishable
- The material covers matching background and character styles so neither looks imported from elsewhere, shot-level visual planning, and designing within the real constraints of a production's schedule and capability
This level is for designers defining the visual identity of a production. The work is no longer drawing but deciding, and then communicating those decisions clearly enough that a team of people can produce coherent work without you drawing any of it. It demands the ability to translate a script into a visual proposition, and to hold that proposition steady against schedule pressure and competing opinion.
By the end of this level you can define how a production should look, explain that definition clearly enough for others to execute it, and hold the standard consistently across work you did not make. You can tell when an ambitious idea is worth the production cost and when it is not. The visual outcome of a project becomes something you can be responsible for.
What You'll Learn
- The material examines establishing a visual language from a script and justifying it in terms of the story, and communicating that direction to a team so it survives being interpreted by many hands
- It covers balancing ambition against what can realistically be produced, adapting an existing style faithfully when a project requires it, and judging incoming work against a standard consistently rather than by instinct