North Shore High School students in multimedia, under the direction of teacher Laura Green, recently designed an original cartoon character using Adobe Illustrator.
“Each student created an original cartoon character in my class,” Green said. “They were sketched out, scanned into illustrator, and then developed using the paint brush, live paint bucket, and slice tools. Additionally, then they were then placed on comic book covers.”
The characters were chosen based on the student’s interest and included cartoon favorites from Monsters Inc., Incredibles, Toy Story, etc. Some of the objectives of this lesson included:
• Design an original cartoon character utilizing Adobe Illustrator
• Add shading to your character including darks/shadows and lights/highlights
• Use correct terminology associated with cartooning (for example, thumbnail sketch, point of view, rule of thirds, cast shadow, and mid-tones)
• Develop advanced Adobe Illustrator skills (i.e., the slice tool)
• When complete, place your character on a Comic Book cover
Some procedures that the students were suggested to follow to be successful included:
• Discuss the project with your peers, show websites on cartooning, and sketch out your ideas for the cartoon character on paper
• Research other cartoon characters for inspiration and use facial features
• Scan drawing into the computer for sketch development include color and shading
• Make scan template layer on top using many layers
• Use paintbrush as a drawing tool
Green said that she reminded her multimedia students to keep in mind the following important things, “design using bold colors, use facial expression to tell the story and give the character’s personality, and explore inanimate objects as characters.”
Lastly, her students developed a bold comic cover utilizing perspective and dimension to give each original character a 3D feel. Thank you to all of the students and Ms. Green for creating such colorful and original cartoon characters that could “co-star in any PIXAR movie.”
Please view this video created for multimedia by Travis Goss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKnDUbfl8iY&t=292s.
Submitted by the North Shore Central School District
