Designing Animatable PSD Characters in Procreate

We begin our sketch with the head.

With our rough sketch down, this video focuses on refining the sketch so we can achieve proper shape design and perspective.

With the head sketched we can move to the hair.

Moving down to the body, we we build up using basic shapes and then round things off from there.

With the body sketched, the arms and legs are the next focus.

This video is dedicated to fining the arms on our character sketch.

We now take some time to overview the entire sketch to make any tweaks before applying our ink layers.

Here we take a moment to talk about the importance of laying your layers when planning to animate a character.

Here we lay out our inking layers to help establish an order for our character layout.

We start with the head using our ink brush to paint in bold, distinctive lines.

We continue inking with the hair.

Now we ink the two strands hanging off the main hair layer. Again, we separate these assets for the sake of animation.

We complete the upper portion of the character by inking the hair.

Time to ink the torso! We will start with the shirt. Separating the shirt and jacket allows for more robust animation possibilities.

With the torso inked, the jacket can be overlaid.

With our ink brush in hand, let's move on to the neck and collar! Having the neck separated allows for more natural head movements in software like Moho.

Time to ink the arms and legs! We will separate the hands and feet for the sake of rigging and animating.

Here we will create three poses for each hand which allows for more animation possibilities once rigged.

Here we will duplicate our front limbs to create the back limbs.

We begin adding our base colors to the head and hair.

Next we go in and color in all the design work for the jacket and shirt.

We finish adding base colors by filling in the arms and legs.

We begin our shading process by focusing on the face and hair.

Now we will move in and focus on the finer details for the head and hair.

Now we move to shade the shirt and jacket.

Now we move to the arms and legs for shading.

Now we shade the feet!

And finally we complete with shading the hands.

We begin the process of highlighting with the head.

Now we apply highlights to the shirt and jacket.

Now we highlight the limbs, feet and hands.

Here we merge our shade and highlight layers to help streamline when rigging and animating.

Here we sketch out all the common phonemes used when lip syncing characters.

With the sketches in place, we can now ink the phonemes.

With the ink lines in, coloring our phonemes is the next task.

Now we shade and highlight each mouth pose.

Here we finish off by highlighting the lips.

Before we dive in and sketch our different head angles, we need to create some guides to help us with lining up the new heads properly.

With the guides in place we can start by sketching the front angle of the head.

With the head in place we can now use it and the guides as a reference for designing the hair.

By using Procreate's symmetry tool, we can polish up the front head view before taking it to the next stage.

Here we repeat the steps above, except this time applying it to the profile shot of the head.

Here we show you how to export out your Procreate file as a PSD for rigging and animation.

My final thoughts on this project.