Fortunately, there are tutorials available that can help you master the art of creating amazing characters with Adobe Illustrator. In this collection, we’ve gathered the best tutorials to help get you started.

These tutorials offer something for everyone. You’ll learn how to use different tools and techniques to create detailed and expressive characters that are full of personality. From learning how to draw basic shapes to creating intricate facial expressions, these tutorials cover a range of topics.

But the fun doesn’t stop there! Once you’ve created your character, you can continue to customize it to fit your project’s needs. With Illustrator’s vast array of design tools, you can add unique textures, colors, and even animations to bring your character to life.

You might also like these HTML & CSS character design code snippets.

How to Create a Character in Adobe Illustrator

If you have pencil sketches lying around and want to turn them into digital works of art, this tutorial is for you. You’ll learn how to take a pencil sketch and turn it into a vector image with Adobe Illustrator.

How to Create a Vector Ninja Character (Video Tutorial)

Don’t miss this video tutorial from Chris over at Spoon Graphics if you love video tutorials. In just under 10 minutes, you will learn how to create ninja characters using Adobe Illustrator.

Monster Character Creation Kit

There are times when you don’t have time to create a vector character from scratch, yet your projects still call for it. This character creation kit has everything you need to quickly design adorable and unique monster characters.

How to Draw Isometric Character Art

Isometric art allows you to convey all three dimensions at full scale, so if that’s something you’d like to get better at or need for your design project, this tutorial is for you. The tutorial walks you through the entire process step by step.

How to Create the Masha and the Bear Characters

This tutorial will teach you how to create the characters from Masha and the Bear. This tutorial is perfect for any project geared toward a young audience, and the knowledge will help you create similar-style drawings.

How To Draw A Cartoon In Illustrator

Ever wanted to make your own cartoon? Well, now you can, thanks to this detailed Illustrator tutorial. You will learn what goes into making a cartoon, how to plan the theme of your cartoon, and how to put together an effective scene that helps you tell the story.

PixityLand-Character Creator Kit

This is another character creation kit that will allow you to create PixityLand characters. You can mix and match different elements to create entirely new characters, which makes this kit a perfect solution when you need custom characters quickly.

How to Create a Flat Design Character (Video Tutorial)

Flat design is all the rage nowadays, and in this video tutorial, you will learn how to apply flat design principles and create a full-blown character in Illustrator.

How to Create a Cute Welsh Corgi Character

Corgis are adorable. They are even more adorable when you turn them into cute illustrated characters. Learn how to use Adobe Illustrator to create the cutest Welsh Corgi you’ve ever seen.

Doctors and Children Flat People Characters

If you have a project that requires doctor or children characters, don’t miss out on this template. You’ll find plenty of premade characters that will make your project go faster.

How To Create a Cute Dinosaur Character

Take your Illustrator skills to the next level and learn how to design a cute dinosaur. This tutorial is perfect for children’s birthday invitations or even stationery design that appeals to young kids just starting school.

How to Create a Summer Illustration

Summer is just around the corner. What better way to celebrate than to create a summer Illustration depicting a beach scene? This tutorial will also warm you up during cold winter days, so be sure to check it out.

Animal Characters Set

When you’re working on a design project involving pets or animals, you need adorable animal characters. Use this template as a starting point or as an inspiration to create your own animal characters.

How to Design a Handsome Flat Hipster Character

This tutorial will help you design a handsome hipster character done up in a flat design style. You’ll learn how to use simple geometric shapes, Live Corners, and Stroke and Align panels.

How to Create a Retro Poster With an Astronaut Child

Another retro-inspired tutorial that will teach you how to create an astronaut child using Warp tools, Clipping Mask, and textures to give it a unique look.

Geek Character Set

Not only is this geeky character template perfect if you need geek characters quickly, but you can also use it as an inspiration for your own character design.

How to Create A Cute Creature Character

Take a look at this tutorial to learn how to make a cute creature from a sketch you already have. You’ll learn how to make use of custom brushes, the Paintbrush tool, the Pen tool, and the Live Paint Bucket tool.

How to Create a Deep Diving Character Illustration

Using simple and basic shapes along with the offset effect can produce exciting results. Use this Illustrator tutorial to create a fantastic deep-diving character illustration, perfect for any summer or ocean-related project.

How to Create a Vector Hipster Character (Video Tutorial)

This is another video tutorial from Chris over at Spoon Graphics. He shows you how to use basic shapes to construct a vector hipster character which makes the entire process much faster.

How To Create an 8-Bit Pixel Character

Pixels are usually associated with Photoshop, but in this tutorial, you will be using the rectangle tool to create a vector illustration that looks like a simple 8-bit style pixel character.

Isometric Characters Constructor Kit

I shared a tutorial earlier in this post that will teach you how to design isometric characters. If you want to speed up the process, consider using this isometric character constructor kit.

How to Draw Characters in Illustrator

Use this tutorial to learn how to create a female character from scratch. The tutorial uses a step-by-step approach to turn a sketch into a finished vector illustration in Illustrator.

How to Draw a Boxing Kangaroo Character

This tutorial teaches you how to make a cute boxing kangaroo character in Illustrator. You’ll work with the Path and Blend tool as well as effects and brushes to make your illustration appear more realistic.

How to Create Easy Kawaii Animals

If you want to learn how to create kawaii animals, this tutorial is for you. You’ll learn how to use the warp effect, move anchor points, and use the Pathfinder panel. The tutorial also teaches you to how to properly use the Line Segment Tool and the Reflect Tool.

How to Draw a Cute Glowing Jellyfish

Jellyfish are not cute when you meet them in real life, but this cute jellyfish character is nothing to be afraid of. Learn how to create this cute glowing character with basic geometric shapes, the Pathfinder panel, and various Effects.

How to Create a Character Kit in Adobe Illustrator

Creating your own characters in Illustrator will become a piece of cake once you’ve gone through the tutorials listed here. With this last tutorial, take it a step further and create your very own character kit that will speed up your character design process in the future.

Create Compelling Characters in Illustrator

Illustrated characters add life and personality to any design project. Use the tutorials in this article to learn how to create compelling characters for any design project. You will also sharpen your Illustrator skills and learn new design techniques that you’ll apply in your everyday work and design projects.

More Illustrator Tutorials

The post 20+ Best Tutorials for Creating Characters in Illustrator appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

They are great for dialogue bubbles in comics, adding personality to characters’ words and creating an atmosphere that matches the visual style of the artwork. They can also be used in other contexts where a casual, light-hearted feel is needed. This includes party invitations, children’s websites, and casual game UIs.

While comic or cartoon fonts can add character to a design, they should be used sparingly and in the proper context. They should be restricted to large titles, headers, or short paragraphs where their unique style can shine without making them hard to read.

This collection shares the top currently available free cartoon and comic fonts. Feel free to explore and download your favorites. Some of these fonts are free for personal use, and some can be downloaded and used in commercial projects. So, remember to check the licensing terms for each font to ensure you’re using them correctly.

Reality Check Comic Font

Free to Download

Reality Check is an excellent choice for a comic book font. It features bold uppercase letters and a few extra symbols. It is free for personal use.

Adam Warren Pro Font Family

Free to Download

The Adam Warren font family includes three weights: regular, bold, and bold italic. You can download and use the font in any personal project. If you want to use the font for commercial purposes, a donation is appreciated.

Best Friends Comic Font

Best Friends is a bold comic-style font that’s an excellent choice for any comic book or poster design with a futuristic theme.

Boldly Missy Comic Handwriting Font

Free to Download

This font has been inspired by the comic book Basic Instructions. The font is based on the designer’s handwriting and can be used freely in personal and commercial projects.

Badaboom Comic Font

Free to Download

Badaboom is the original comic book font used worldwide in print and television. You can download it for free for non-commercial purposes or indie comic books.

Nikopol Typeface

If you’re working on a vintage-style comic book, the Nikopol font is a perfect choice. It includes uppercase letters, punctuation, and numbers, and it also comes in regular, rough, and halftone styles.

Komika Font Family

Free to Download

The Komika typeface includes 50 comic book-style fonts and is available for both commercial and personal projects without any restrictions.

Woodchuck Sans-Serif Font

Free to Download

Woodchuck is a free and modern sans-serif font that would work well in any comic book. The font is free for personal and commercial use. It has uppercase and lowercase letters, over 100 characters, and glyphs.

Cutlass Typeface

The Cutlass typeface is a modern font inspired by classic horror movies. It comes with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation symbols.

Comic Neue Font

Free to Download

Comic Neue was created to improve the Comic Sans typeface. It features both uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. The font comes in two variants, each offering light, regular, bold weights, and oblique versions.

Chubby Dotty Font

Free to Download

The Chubby Dotty font would be perfect for children’s or comic books for younger audiences. It has a playful dotted look and comes in all-caps and small-caps variants.

Little Pea Font

This handwritten font would be an excellent choice for children’s books.

Creative Block Comic Font

Free to Download

The Creative Block font is another bold comic book font. It comes in two weights and supports limited European characters. It can be downloaded and used for non-profit purposes or indie comics.

Qarmic Sans Font

Free to Download

The Qarmic Sans font is a variant of Comic Sans but more rounded. It can be used for free for both personal and commercial projects. The font includes uppercase and lowercase letters, symbols, and numbers.

Simpsonfont

If you love The Simpsons, this font is a must. The new and updated version includes support for European characters.

GoodDog Plain Font

Free to Download

This font can be used for personal and commercial purposes without restrictions. It includes uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.

Crime Fighter Comic Font

Free to Download

The Crime Fighter font can be used for free in indie comics and non-profit projects. It includes uppercase letters, symbols, and numbers and comes in two weight variants.

Billy 2.0 Typeface

Free to Download

Billy font is a modern, rounded typeface that can be used for personal projects. It includes uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. If you want to use the font commercially, you will need to purchase a license.

VTC Letterer Pro Font

Free to Download

The VTC Letterer Pro is an all-caps font that would work well for comic books and any other projects where a bold look is needed. It is free for personal and commercial use.

Back Issues Comic Font

Free to Download

This font has a bold look that resembles street graffiti. It comes with uppercase letters, symbols, and numbers. The license allows you to use the font freely in indie and non-profit projects.

Kalam on Google Fonts

Free to Download

The Kalam font can be downloaded from Google Fonts and used in personal and commercial projects. It supports the Devanagari and Latin writing systems and comes in three weights.

Conclusion

Comic and cartoon fonts are bold and playful, ideal for modern design projects. Their whimsical shapes and light-hearted nature make them perfect for adding humor and joy to your work. You can use these free fonts to create engaging and approachable designs.

If you need to add cartoon flair to your design projects, consider using these Photoshop actions.

The post 20+ Fun & Free Comic Fonts for Creatives appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

But you can use it for lots of fun projects too. Like, for example, building character designs with just CSS. Sounds weird right?

Well it definitely is. And I’ve collected some of the weirdest (yet coolest) character designs, all made from 100% pure HTML & CSS code.

1. Angry Birds

Who doesn’t love Angry Birds? They started as a game and somehow got their own movie after puncturing pop culture.

And this pen by Rachel Bull proves that the Angry Birds can even find their way into CSS.

Ironically there is one image on this page, and it’s used to embed the custom type at the very top. Every other element from the curves of those birds to the custom gradients all run on pure CSS.

Maybe not the most practical code snippet but certainly an inspiration.

2. Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is widely known as the revived green-skinned creature. Although it’s technically Frankeinstein’s monster, that doesn’t roll off the tongue so well.

And while this Frankenstein creature may be somewhat mistitled it’s still one of the best character designs I’ve seen.

It works on just 40 lines of HTML and developer Victoria Ninni Bergquist even added some CSS to help the monster blink. Pretty neat!

3. Toy Story Alien

Pixar’s Toy Story has so many memorable characters and these wacky alien guys are certainly part of that cast.

Sunyoung Park built this pen as a demo for CSS and to test the boundaries of frontend coding. It should render properly in all major browsers and even some older browsers. Although it does rely on the rotate() property quite a bit.

Luckily this comes as part of the CSS transforms feature which supports browsers dating back to IE9+. So this little green alien can delight most of the Internet-connected world.

4. Aku Aku

If you had a PlayStation then you probably know about Crash Bandicoot. Well this crazy guy named Aku Aku is a perfect replica of the mask… creature… thing.

Each element has its own div with a relevant class defining that feature(ie. eye, nose lip).

I’d say the toughest part of this whole design is the feather crown on his head. Plus the cool animations that might encourage gamers to pick up their old Crash games.

5. Baby Squirtle

Here’s another great example of animation mixed with CSS character design.

Josh Bader coded this Squirtle character using pure CSS and only 15 lines of HTML. Impressive!

To get the walking effect Josh appended the :after pseudo-class onto each element with a repeating animation. A surprisingly simple feat once you look under the hood and it’s even more surprising how such little code is required to build characters like these.

6. Rick Without A Morty

In this pen you’ll find the wacky work of developer James Gilmore who crafted a chibi-fied Rick in pure CSS.

The design actually uses some nice CSS drop shadows to create depth and give this character some life. Not to mention the repeating animation that also blends nicely with the design.

Note this also runs on Sass and if you wanna tinker with it there are custom variables in the code. It’s very well formatted, so this would be an awesome snippet to study for learning Sass.

7. Brian Griffin

Here’s another character design by Rachel Bull, this one featuring Family Guy’s Brian Griffin.

It’s surprising how much detail you can get with just pure CSS. The entire style of Brian matches closely to the show’s art style, and it uses drop shadows that feel incredibly realistic.

Although this one is pretty technical with well over 150+ lines of CSS and it’s using the Compass library to boot.

8. Emmet

From The Lego Movie it’s Emmet in all his glory. Rachel once again built this snippet from scratch using CSS and Haml, the simplified way to write modern HTML.

A few of these elements really stand out as quite impressive for running just on CSS. Notably, the hair swirls really look like plastic Lego pieces. Crazy that this is even possible!

There’s a lot of great Sass logic in the CSS, and if you’re a dev nerd, you’ll enjoy poking around this pen. Both the code and the result are glorious.

9. CSS Eevee

Built around the Pokemon Go phenomenon is this pure CSS Eevee made by David Khourshid.

It uses a similar background and page style as the application while re-creating the entire Pokemon in pure CSS. With a bit of texturing and some intelligent layering, David made this Eevee actually look 3D!

The animations are also a nice touch, and they make the whole thing feel more realistic. Whether you’re a fan of Pokemon or have never touched the game, you’ve got to admit this is good work.

10. Mickey Mouse

While this Mickey Mouse head is a little simpler it’s also quite a feat. You might think it’d be easier to manage because it’s static, however the pen pushes over 450+ lines of Sass.

The most technical part is getting all the shapes in order and rearranging the elements to align properly on top of each other.

Yet the result is fantastic, and you can see the resemblance to early Mickey cartoons.

11. Princess Zelda

I’ve saved the best for last with this Zelda character design. She’s a bit short in the legs but overall the style is accurate.

Developer Charlie Marcotte uses Sass and custom CSS transforms to arrange all the elements. Plus the raw HTML is simplified quite a bit thanks to the Pug preprocessor.

If you’re trying to push the limits of your CSS knowledge why not take up a similar project? It’s a great way to test your skills, and you can always share whatever you build in the comments below.

The post 10 Character Designs Created Entirely With HTML & CSS appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.