Sharjah :
In a lively workshop presented by the 41st Sharjah International Book Fair in
conjunction with Skilldeer, an online platform providing a wide range of courses
and fun activities, youngsters had the chance to learn about animated character
design and how to create a back-story to guide their illustration.
The workshop was presented by Maha Al Mheiri, an Emerati who spent many
years in Japan honing her skills creating manga, a Japanese graphic novel style,
originally developed in the late 19th century.
Maha greeted the young attendees in Japanese and introduced them to the basics of
drawing a cartoon character using simple shapes, saying, “If you can draw circles,
squares and triangles then you can draw Manga!”
The animated teacher went on to explain to children that having a story behind
your character can help to define what they could look like and asked the class to
think of details to associate their subjects. Starting with a name and age, she
decided her character would be known as “Zoe” and would be 10 years old. She
moved on to what the character’s possible likes and dislikes could be, such as, for
example, liking roller coasters but possibly disliking traffic.
Expanding on these attributes, she determined strengths, weaknesses and potential
“floors” of the character, explaining that “Zoe” could be fast and strong in relation
to her passion for roller coasters, but could be impatient due to her dislike of
traffic.
The class then moved on to putting pencil to paper as she instructed students to
construct a basic figure using a circle to depict the head and simple squares and
rectangles to divide up body proportions. After a couple of iterations and additional
basic shapes, students found that they had already started to form a well
proportioned body for their character.
After the pencil work was complete, the class took out their pens and started to
flesh out their characters, adding facial details, arms, legs and eventually clothing.
In no time at all, the class had created impressive characters in the Japanese Manga
style, and the teacher commented on how amazing everybody’s work was. Using
her techniques, the students had grasped the concept of building up their character,
layer by layer, while considering their attributes to create a drawing with an origin
story.
Maha ended the workshop giving the youngsters an enthusiastic farewell in
Japanese and wished them well on their futures and passion for illustrating
characters.