Building an Animation-Ready Character from the Ground Up

From the stick sketch, add bulk using plain shapes. Visualize the body, and try to break it down into rectangles, triangles, cylinders, and circles. Try to think in three dimensions; for instance, my head isn’t just a circle with a triangle tacked on to it. It’s a curving sphere with a pyramid appended to the bottom, which means that I need to think about the dimensions that aren’t visible as well as the dimensions that are. The neck is a cylinder, set atop a pyramid for the slope down to the circles of the shoulders and then perched atop the tapering box of the chest.

Don’t get too detailed here; you’re not trying to capture accuracy. You just want to get a basic idea of bulk and form, captured in simple shapes. Look at it as building an old-style wooden marionette, before they’re carved in detail.