Telling a story through your artwork is so much more than creating a pretty picture, it’s about conveying a message or a feeling that creates an emotional connection between your work and the viewer. Typically, what holds a story together are the relationships between characters – how characters interact with each other not only helps to drive a story forward but it also tells you a lot about their personalities and motivations. One of the most effective ways to communicate this visually is through body language.

Throughout the class we’ll cover:

• • How to understand and convey body language through your drawings

• • Creating expressive character poses from imagination

• • Drawing hand gestures & 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 are a beginner then I would 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.