Designing Macho and Overweight Male Characters by Paris Christou

In this course, you will learn how to use basic shapes to create the heads and bodies of both Macho and Overweight characters, as well as develop a library of features to create different facial expressions. Paris will show you how to exaggerate certain elements to give your characters a Macho & Overweight look. Throughout the course, Paris will design four characters, two heroes, and two villains, and teach you how to pose them in motion and various expressions. This course focuses solely on cartooning and is 9 hours long. Paris will be using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 6 to demonstrate the techniques, but you can follow along with any major artistic software or use traditional pencil and paper.

The course is divided into five stages, with a total running time of 9 hours.

• Stage 1, “The Faces,” takes 1 hour and 30 minutes and covers the creation process of both the Macho & Overweight characters’ faces, as well as understanding the head shape and features necessary to develop a Macho & Overweight Character.
• Stage 2, “The Library,” takes 55 minutes and teaches you how to create different styles of eyes, eye shapes, as well as a library of noses, ears, and mouths.
• Stage 3, “Understanding the Bodies,” takes 46 minutes and helps you understand the basic shapes of the body and which body features to exaggerate to create a Macho & Overweight Character.
• Stage 4, “Posing in Motion,” takes 4 hours and 7 minutes and focuses on designing the Macho & Overweight characters’ bodies and using an animated approach of action to pose the characters.
• Stage 5, “Expressions,” takes 2 hours and 14 minutes and emphasizes the importance of expressions, including practicing drawing the characters’ faces and using a lipsync animation technique to develop the characters’ expressions.

As a bonus, the course includes a short exercise based on everything you’ve learned in the course, as well as a folder with all the drawings created in each stage.