Drawing for Storyboards

Name: Drawing for Storyboards
Rating: 4.4 (257 reviews)

Learn to draw for animation, storyboards, cartoon drawing, character design & story art

Created bySiobhan Twomey

Last updated 1/2021

English

English [Auto],

What you'll learn

Become a storyboard artist
Learn the ways of drawing boards for animation
Animation principles and design
Character design, character posing and expression
How to draw for animation
How to draw suggested backgrounds
Understand and apply perspective to your board panels

Course content

4 sections • 18 lectures • 2h 53m total length

Introduction3:10
Learn drawing for animation and storyboards by outlining the course, with tips on paper and photoshop workflow. Master characters, backgrounds, sequences, perspective, shots, patterns, and a final storyboard project.
Tips for Drawing on Paper10:38
Discover practical tips for drawing storyboards on paper, using pencils, pens, charcoal, and tracing with lightboxes or window tracing, plus light construction lines to prep panels.
Drawing on Paper Demo7:45
Learn a quick paper drawing workflow for pirate characters, from rough gesture sketches and varied line work to scanning, tidying up in Photoshop, and preparing for digital coloring.
Scanning your Artwork7:05
Scan your artwork with a Mac scanner, adjust color and dpi, and save to documents. Import to Photoshop, rotate 90 degrees, tweak levels or curves, then redraw or paint underneath.

Intro to Drawing Characters3:11
Set up a Photoshop workspace for character drawing in storyboards and animation, following conventions and techniques, with layered workflow and a toned background for drawing on the top layer.
Shape Language12:19
Explains shape language as a shorthand for stylized character design in animation and storyboarding, using circles, squares, and triangles to convey personality, balance, and variation.
Basic Shapes
Character Posing9:17
Practice drawing dynamic poses to convey action, emotion, and acting for storyboards, animation, and illustration. Build from basic shapes into structured hips and shoulders, and apply three-quarter perspective and balance.
Drawing Emotion7:01
Learn to convey emotion in storyboards with simple facial cues. Sketch quick eyes, eyebrows, and mouth shapes to depict happy, sad, angry, fright, and laughter, then apply to a character.
Character Pose Sheet7:45
Practice drawing posing to explore a character’s physical dynamics, building a pose sheet of rough, dynamic poses and a neutral pose to inform future storyboarding.
Analyising Student Work: Characters7:51
Explore conventions of drawing characters for storyboard art and animation, including shape language, strong poses, emotion, anticipation poses, and silhouettes learned from peers.

Blocking-in Backgrounds13:09
Block in backgrounds to visualize scenes and explore compositions for storyboarding. Use rough tones and shading in Photoshop to plan environments, from woodsman cabin to pirate interiors, before detailing perspective.
Fundamentals of Perspective14:51
Master one-point and two-point perspective for storyboards using horizon lines, vanishing points, and grids to manage depth, angles, and scale, while aligning shots with story points.
Depth, Scale and Tangents14:34
Develop depth and scale for storyboard drawing without rigid grids, using simple elements, framing, and two-point perspective; emphasize foreground lines, avoid tangents, and apply atmospheric perspective cautiously in line work.
Depth and Scale
Analysing Student Work: Backgrounds17:03
Analysing student backgrounds, this lecture reviews farm scene drawings, offers feedback, and explores depth through overlapping elements and perspective concepts like horizon lines, vanishing points, verticals, tangents, and scale checks.

Intro to Drawing Sequences2:10
Translate scripts into efficient storyboards using given layouts and model sheets, drawing quickly and accurately across angles and poses with basic camera guidance.
Review of Shots and Angles12:03
Explore the six essential shots for visual storytelling, from establishing and wide shots to long, medium, and close-ups, including extreme close-ups, and examine camera angles like high, low, and Dutch.
Directors' Tips for Storyboard Artists8:51
Master professional storyboard techniques by applying directors' tips on dialogue dynamics, over-the-shoulder shots, wider action cuts, and dutch angles to strengthen visual storytelling and character relationships.
Analysing Student Work: Sequences14:25
Analyze how students sequence storyboards, stage action, and choose shots to convey narrative and emotion. Explore beat boards, thumbnails, and camera setups to study pacing and power dynamics.
FINAL PROJECT: DRAW A STORYBOARD

Requirements

This course is for drawing animation storyboards. To learn the other technical aspects of storyboarding, check out the other course "Learn to Storyboard for Film and Animation"
You don't need any requirements to take this course!

Description

Hi! Thank you for checking out Drawing for Storyboarding. This is a fun, engaging course that will teach you how to draw for Animation Storyboards.

First, you’ll learn how to draw characters - how to draw good expressions and poses

From there, you’ll learn the best approaches to drawing suggested backgrounds for your boards - from rough blocking, to adding perspective, and how to draw depth and space in your panels.

You’ll also learn the best practices for story artists - these are the top directors’ tips and I’ll share them with you so that you know what is expected of professional story artists.

I’ll also share with you some sample storyboards of other students in the course series - this is going to be an amazing opportunity for you to not only see diverse examples of different styles of drawing; but importantly, to see how fellow students are approaching their assigments, and working.

There is an opportunity in this course to complete assignments and exercises for each of the topics covered; plus at the end, the class project for this course is to take a page of script and storyboard it out entirely yourself. I’m going to give this project to you as though you were working for a studio - so you’ll get model sheets and layouts, as well as the script and then it’s over to you to put everything that we’ve covered in the course into practice.

This course is a supplement to my successful storyboarding courses:

Learn to Storyboard for Film & Animation

and

Advanced Storyboarding Techniques

Both those courses cover in depth everything you need to know to about storyboarding - the technical aspects, the filmic language and the nuts and bolts of communicating your ideas for a story visually.

This course takes all of those concepts and principles and dials down into the actual process of drawing.

This course is aimed at beginners, so you don’t have to have taken the other storyboarding courses in the series - you could use this as a starting point in fact. If you have taken the other courses in the series, this is going to bump you up to the next level and ensure that you are able to draw fast, fluid, efficiently.

Who this course is for:

Artists, animators, film makers, story tellers
Anyone interested in learning how to draw for animation

Drawing for Storyboards

What you'll learn

Explore related topics

Course content

Introduction4 lectures • 29min

Drawing Characters6 lectures • 47min

Drawing Backgrounds4 lectures • 1hr

Drawing Sequences4 lectures • 37min

Requirements

Description

Who this course is for: