We all love animals! They have so many interesting traits, colors and personalities. Human-animal hybrids is a famous genre of character design, especially in the animation industry. In this tutorial, I'll be showing you a way to draw your own hybrids, for them to be interesting and unique!

 

 

1- The action line

For starters, what's an action line? Action line is a line that guides the flow of the pose. This way your character can feel more natural and the pose can feel more organic and less stiff. Try to think of the pose as a whole and trace a line to guide its direction.

Now a good tip, both for hybrid characters and character design as a whole, is to give each of them a main shape. This will help the drawing/designing process and will also give your character more personality. You can also fit these shapes based on the animal of your choice, for example: oval for a fish, square for a cat and triangle for a toucan.

 

 

2- Shapes and pose

This step works better as an exercise rather than a process! Try to build the whole pose with only the main shape of your character. This will help your brain to see their elements as shapes and use it to guide your drawing, speeding up the process!

 

 

3- Lineart

For the lines, you can use your favorite brush. In my case, I used the default Chalk brush that comes with CSP. Now a tip! Don't try to draw each element of your character separately, like each feather of their wings or each individual hair, instead, group them together. It helps with the time and even make them clearer. The shapes should help you here!

4- Colors

Feel free to watch my process of coloring them! I used a watercolor brush for this one, a default brush called Wet Wash.

 

 

For the colors, a tip I use a lot is to choose 2 to 3 main colors for each character. This way, you can make them more recognizable and simple! The other colors are extra ones, just to make the designs more interesting to the eye. For this, try this mindset: If I had to erase every color of this character but 2/3, which ones would they be?

5- Final Tips

For this final part, I'll just be giving general advice that can help you with your characters and worldbuilding.

 

 

If I erased everything of your character but their silhouette, would they still be recognizable? This is a good exercise to see if your designs are clean and easy to recognize!

Do your characters behave a 100% like humans? Or do they keep some animal traits? A personal preference of mine is to keep some of the animal traits in my characters, they are more fun this way! And it also helps with the worldbuilding and how it behaves. Here are some examples of how I used their traits!

The end

Thank you for giving this tutorial a shot! At the end of the day what matters most is having fun creating! I hope this helped you in some way. Good luck and see you soon! ;)