In this first lesson, I'll start by giving you an overview of my journey in animation from my first drawings, to my student work, all the way to my professional work, and share my early influences that helped me develop as an artist. I will also give you some insight about the role and responsibilities of a visual development artist and touch on the process of working on a film with a director to help them bring their vision to the big screen.

The real work starts here. In this lesson, I’ll pick a subject matter that will be explored during the entirety of the course. I’ll take you through the references I will use, how I intend to use them and why. We’ll then jump into thumbnailing both exterior and interior views of the chosen subject as I talk you through my thought process while doing it. I’ll also be giving you some tips on composition and lighting.

We’ll now focus on the interior view of our subject and push it to the finish line in the next few lessons. In this lesson, I’ll show you how I bring the thumbnail to the next stage: the rough. I’ll talk about perspective and how to add Procreate to the mix with one of its useful tools, and we’ll then move on to clean up the line. You’ll even see me make a big mistake in this lesson, which will become a teachable moment as I share how there are many lessons to be learned even when mistakes are made.

We’ll keep going into our creative task as we tackle the values and lighting of our scene. I’ll break it down into steps to make it fun! I’ll discuss how light affects the objects and creates volume, how shadows are cast and how light can be used to direct the eye to a point of interest.

Our journey continues as we move up to the finish line where we’ll color and paint our scene to make it a vibrant environment, sprinkled with some color theory.

Now that the environment is done, we can focus on character design. In this lesson, we’ll go back to our references to explore who our character is and do a few takes on them to try out various ideas and possibilities. We’ll then go on and add the character to the scene, work on their posing and integrate them to the final piece in a convincing way.

Now we’ll take all of our knowledge and put it to work in a crash course on the exterior environment, but with a slightly different approach.

Voilà! We’ve reached the end of the course! But before you go, I wanted to give you some final advice and share with you my incredible wisdom (sarcastic tone). So in our final lesson, I'll be going over the frequently asked questions I’ve received throughout the years. I'll cover topics such as my recommendations for someone wanting to start a career in visual development, how to build and organize your portfolio, I’ll share my experience of freelancing remotely with its pros and cons, I’ll touch on the money question and I will share some final book recommendations that I think will be very helpful as you continue your learning.