# Drawing People in Procreate: Stylized Character Illustration for Beginners - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/drawing-people-in-procreate-stylized-character-illustration-for-beginners/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Illustration & Drawing · Solid intro · Rated 7 /10 # Drawing People in Procreate: Stylized Character Illustration for Beginners By Gareth B. Davies · Updated July 2026 Iva Mikles · Illustrator | Top Teacher | Art Side of Life Beginner · 137 min A focused 137-minute drill on breaking heads, hair, torso, hands, and legs into simple shapes for stylized Procreate characters. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fdrawing-people-in-procreate-stylized-character-illustration-for-beginners%2F320925655) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. This class teaches a shape-first method for drawing stylized characters in Procreate, and it does exactly what it promises: it takes a beginner from a blank oval to a finished figure standing in a window, without ever asking them to master anatomy first. ## Structure and Method The course moves in a strict build order: brush setup, head, hair, torso and arms, hands, legs and feet, then a proportions lesson before two full reference-based demonstrations. Each body part gets the same treatment. The head starts as a circle with a teardrop shape stacked against it, the point where the two shapes meet marking where the ear sits and where the neck begins. Hands collapse into a mitten with a separate thumb curve, with the rule that the middle finger runs longest and the two flanking fingers step down unevenly. Legs become straight or tapered rectangles, and shoes reduce to a triangle with a heel bump added after. None of this asks for prior drawing knowledge. It asks for pattern recognition, which is a much lower bar and the right one for a beginner audience. The gender-differentiation notes are the most quietly useful part of the early lessons. Rather than lecturing on anatomy, the class gives concrete, immediately testable rules: a thinner neck, a smaller chin, and narrower shoulders read as female, while a heavier jaw and wider shoulder line read as male. These are stylization shortcuts, not biology, and the class is upfront about that, which keeps the advice honest and usable rather than prescriptive. ## Where the Course Earns Its Keep The two reference-based lessons near the end, drawing a plant lady and a yoga pose from a supplied mood board, are where the method actually proves itself. The photo goes onto its own layer at reduced opacity, the shoulders get intentionally shrunk against what the photo shows, and the character gets redrawn on top using the same shape vocabulary built in the earlier lessons. Watching the reasoning behind small edits, like reducing an oversized thigh after the fact or adding a bump to a silhouette to make it read better in negative space, teaches judgment that a shape-diagram alone cannot. This is also where exaggeration gets addressed directly: making the head smaller against wider hips, or lengthening the forearms, with an explicit warning to push the design without letting it "break." The final house composition, with characters placed into individual windows and colored to a shared night palette, gives the whole exercise a satisfying and portfolio-worthy payoff rather than a stack of disconnected sketches. ## Limitations Faces are treated as an afterthought, a handful of simple curves for eyes and a mouth shadow, with the class explicitly deferring real facial design to characters seen "far away." Anyone hoping to draw expressive close-up faces will need a different resource. Leg and body poses beyond standing are similarly thin, so dynamic action poses are out of scope. The pacing is unhurried and occasionally repetitive, particularly across the hairstyle sketches, which cover many small variations without adding new principles. For a beginner specifically wanting a starting framework for character shapes, though, the course delivers a complete, practical system in just over two hours. The standout The reference-tracing method in lesson 11, where a photo is dropped in at reduced opacity and redrawn with deliberately shrunk shoulders and simplified joints, is the one technique that turns real people into a usable personal shape-vocabulary. ## What you will learn - · Building heads in front, three-quarter, and side view from a circle plus a teardrop shape - · Simplifying male and female differences through neck thickness, jaw size, and shoulder width - · Silhouette-first hairstyling, sketching the outer shape before any strand detail - · Reducing hands to a mitten shape with a separate thumb curve and a longest-middle-finger rule - · Turning references into original stylized characters by sketching over a reduced-opacity photo - · Placing finished characters into a house-window composition with balance and exaggeration choices Best for: Beginner-to-intermediate digital illustrators who already know basic Procreate navigation and want a repeatable shape-based system for drawing stylized people. Skip it if: Anyone wanting facial expression work, full-body walking poses, or traditional anatomy instruction, since faces and legs beyond standing poses are treated only briefly. Helpful Examples Clarity of Instruction Organization of Lessons Engaging Teacher [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fdrawing-people-in-procreate-stylized-character-illustration-for-beginners%2F320925655)