# ODD BODIES: Illustrating Expressive, Stylized People - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/odd-bodies-illustrating-expressive-stylized-people/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Illustration & Drawing · Deep dive · Rated 8 /10 # ODD BODIES: Illustrating Expressive, Stylized People By Gareth B. Davies · Updated July 2026 Tom Froese · Illustrator and Designer Intermediate · 144 min A working illustrator breaks down his exact process for stylizing figures through six hands-on drawing exercises and one full inked illustration. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fodd-bodies-illustrating-expressive-stylized-people%2F562332090) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. Tom Froese opens by admitting he used to avoid drawing people altogether, and that confession sets the tone for the whole course. This is not a class about mastering anatomy. It is about what to do once you already understand anatomy well enough to deliberately break it. ## Structure and framework The course front-loads its thinking before any pencil hits paper. Lesson one walks through ten illustrators, from Malika Favre's flattened vector precision to Marcus Oakley's collage-like naivety, using each as a case study in a different stylization strategy. This is more useful than a typical inspiration reel because Froese names the specific mechanism each artist relies on: negative space standing in for form, a single bold garment as the conceptual anchor, a refusal to soften contours. Lesson two condenses his approach into a five-word acronym, FACES, for flatten, abstract, clarify, exaggerate, simplify. It is a tidy device, and more importantly each term gets a concrete, non-abstract example, such as reducing a Christmas tree to a triangle to illustrate abstraction. Lesson three, on the five pain points, is the strongest single piece of teaching in the course. Faces, ears, the head-to-neck join, hands, and feet are the places where beginners either overwork a drawing chasing realism or freeze up entirely. Froese's advice is blunt and specific: four fingers instead of five because five often reads as wrong, no visible neck on male figures because the head can simply sit on the body, ears reduced to a couple of bumps and a squiggle. This is the kind of decisive, opinionated guidance that separates a course from a mood board. ## The exercises The six exercises build in difficulty and abstraction. Action Figures and Action Figures From Memory train the transition from tracing reference photos to inventing confident contour lines without one. Page of Poses and People in Shapes push further from source material, the latter asking the student to draw an arbitrary polygon first and then intuitively fit a figure inside it, a genuinely inventive constraint that forces unexpected proportions. Cutouts swaps the pencil for scissors, demanding a figure be cut from a single piece of paper in one go, which by its nature produces simplified, imperfect shapes. Exaggeration closes the sequence by pairing a figure with an object, using the interaction to justify more extreme poses. Each exercise is explicitly iterative: rough sketch, trace, refine, trace again, which mirrors how working illustrators actually develop a drawing rather than expecting a clean result on the first pass. ## The bonus project and its limits The bonus project, a full Photoshop illustration built from one of the exercise sketches, is generous in scope but also the most tool-specific stretch of the course. It walks through building a layered file, tracing a base illustration with the pen tool, then scanning hand-inked marks made with a nib pen and brushes and compositing them onto the vector shapes using alpha channels and clipping masks. It is a real, usable production pipeline, but it assumes access to Photoshop, a scanner, and patience with fairly dense layer management, and Froese repeatedly defers to two of his other classes for techniques he does not re-explain here. Students who only want the drawing philosophy, not the finishing pipeline, can skip this section without losing the core value of the class. Overall the course delivers exactly what it promises: a disciplined method for drawing people that trades realism for personality, backed by exercises that actually force the habit rather than just describing it. The standout The 'five pain points' lesson, which gives a direct, opinionated answer for how much detail the face, ears, neck, hands, and feet actually need in a stylized figure, is worth the price on its own. ## What you will learn - · A five-part framework (flatten, abstract, clarify, exaggerate, simplify) for pushing realistic figures toward a stylized visual language - · How to identify and simplify the five recurring problem areas in figure drawing: face, ears, head-to-neck connection, hands, and feet - · A contour-tracing method for turning a reference photo into a flattened stylized sketch through repeated iteration - · How to draw a figure from memory and inside an arbitrary shape to build intuitive, non-literal proportion choices - · A full Photoshop workflow for taking a rough pencil sketch to a finished vector illustration with scanned ink textures layered on top - · How to make analog ink marks with a nib pen and brush, then use Photoshop alpha channels and clipping masks to apply that texture to flat vector shapes Best for: Illustrators who already draw people reasonably well and want to break away from literal, reference-bound figure work toward a looser, more personal style. Skip it if: Absolute beginners with no drawing experience, or anyone looking for classical figure-drawing or anatomy instruction rather than stylization. Clarity of Instruction Helpful Examples Actionable Steps Engaging Teacher [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fodd-bodies-illustrating-expressive-stylized-people%2F562332090)