Drawing with DreamWorks, featuring The Boss Baby

About DreamWorks Animation

DreamWorks Animation (DWA), a division of the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, within NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast Corporation, is a global family entertainment company with feature film and television brands. The company’s deep portfolio of intellectual property is supported by a robust, worldwide consumer products practice, which includes licensing, and location-based entertainment venues around the world. DWA’s feature film heritage includes many of the world’s most beloved characters and franchises, including Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, Trolls and The Boss Baby, and have amassed more than $15 billion in global box office receipts. DreamWorks Animation’s television business has quickly become one of the world’s leading producers of high-quality, animated family programming, reaching consumers in more than 190 countries. Creating a diverse array of original content in a variety of formats and delivering deep, fully immersive worlds served up with compelling characters, the prolific studio has garnered 27 Emmy® Awards since inception in 2013.

About the class

Learn to draw animated characters with a real DreamWorks animator! Students will draw along with animator Paul Schoeni and create their own drawing of The Boss Baby, while learning the fundamental pillars of drawing characters. They’ll learn how combining simple shapes creates the most compelling characters, and see which shapes and relative sizes convey different characteristics and personality types. And they’ll discover the secrets of animation: how varying broad and thin lines adds elegance to drawings, why artists often prefer to leave lines incomplete, and much more. Plus look for advice and demonstrations on how to draw other beloved DreamWorks characters, including Stoick from How To Train Your Dragon and Lucky from Spirit Riding Free.

Meet your expert instructor, Paul.

Paul has had a love of art and drawing ever since he was a little kid growing up in Iowa. This eventually led him to study animation at Brigham Young University where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2003. His first job in the industry was at visual effects studio Digital Domain helping create the CGI for the movie I,Robot. He joined Dreamworks Animation in 2005 to work on the movie Kung Fu Panda and has been there ever since. He has worked on over 14 feature animated films for Dreamworks, including How To Train Your Dragon (2 and 3), Monsters vs Aliens, The Croods, Megamind, Shrek Forever After, and Trolls. He also worked as the Lead 3D Modeler on The Boss Baby and in 2017 he moved into the Art Department to work as a Visual Development Artist on Trolls World Tour, The Croods: A New Age, Spirit Untamed, and an unannounced project due to be released in 2023. Paul lives in Los Angeles with his wife Amber and their four kids, and he teaches part-time at ArtCenter College of Design.