Master Independent Animation and Color Expression by JDGE

Want to stop just drawing stills and actually make them move? This class walks you through the full indie loop with JDGE — from bouncing ball timing to blinks, walks, runs, backgrounds that sit right, and color that tells the viewer where to look.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• Animate shapes, easing, and timing that transfer to any character or effect
• Draw consistent characters and animate blinking, lip-sync, hair, and clothes
• Build walks, runs, jumps, turns, and sitting / lifting / throwing actions
• Match characters to backgrounds using base figures, eye level, and perspective
• Direct the eye with color planes, composition, and lighting
• Color with theory, not vibes — RGB relativity, tone curves, grisaille, and layer modes
• Add camera work in CLIP STUDIO PAINT — pan, follow, shake, and flicker

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Basic drawing ability, no prior animation experience needed
• Tools: CLIP STUDIO PAINT EX, drawing tablet recommended
• Hardware: PC or tablet capable of running CLIP STUDIO PAINT smoothly

📝 Description

This is not theory-only animation talk. You start in CLIP STUDIO PAINT EX setting up cells, timelines, onion skin, and FPS, then you animate a ball until easing and spacing actually click. That boring ball? It fixes 90% of floaty beginner motion.

From there you get into characters for real. Base figures, head counts, center of gravity, faces, wrinkles — then you put them in motion: blinks, mouths, head sway, hair dynamics, walks and runs. JDGE keeps it practical with cell separation tips so parts stop breaking when they move.

The middle chunk is what most solo animators mess up: perspective. You learn to pull eye level and vanishing points straight from the body, size props correctly, and draw backgrounds in normal, bird’s-eye, and worm’s-eye views. No more floating characters.

Then color. This is JDGE’s strong suit. You work with color planes, gaze direction, and light-as-exaggeration instead of just shading harder. He breaks down why pure white/black kills your image, how gray vs. saturated color tricks the eye, plus tone curves, grisaille, layer modes, flare, and aerial perspective — with numbers, not just feel.

You finish by making a full short: concept, layout, color rough, motion rough, keys, in-betweens, clean-up, background finish, camera, and export. You get traceable Clip Studio files, PSDs, and perspective drills to study frame by frame.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• Beginners in animation who want to finish their own self-produced short
• Artists who struggle to lock characters and backgrounds into the same perspective
• Illustrators who want more appealing coloring, lighting, and composition

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

JDGE is a freelance illustrator and animator from Japan, known for warm short animations and bold, graphic color choices. Before going freelance, he spent several years as a game illustrator.

His credits include character design for Kodansha’s Kumei no Ryuki, in-game art for Utawarerumono: Lost Flag, key animation for ONE PIECE #1091 and Proseka MV NEO, plus work on Genshin Impact and VTuber MVs. He also took the Grand Prize at the EIZO Illustration Contest. He teaches indie-first: flexible base figures, strong acting ideas, and color you can control.

🏁 Final Result

• A finished original short animation — from layout and color rough to keys, in-betweens, background, camera work, and export — plus polished stills and color roughs ready for your portfolio.

📢 Guys, this is a Group Buy campaign, check the GBC forum thread to get access

You can find the course preview in the download section below.