From Sketch to Cartoon: Create Animated Characters with AI

Learn how to design and animate a complete cartoon character using artificial intelligence, from the first concept sketch to a cinematic short video ready for social media. In this course, Daniel Arranz guides you through a professional workflow that combines character design, illustration, AI image generation and video creation.

You will start by defining a 3D-rendered boy in cartoon style, inspired by Pixar, DreamWorks and Disney. Using ChatGPT / GPT-5 you will craft powerful prompts and generate variations of your character in tools such as Nano Banana, Ideogram, Freepik and Reve. You will build a solid base design, create consistent versions in different poses and develop a full turnaround and expression sheet that capture personality, emotion and style.

Then you will refine your images with Photoshop, Illustrator and Adobe Firefly. You will learn how to adjust perspectives, change outfits, combine faces and bodies, harmonize lighting, clean backgrounds and create environments tailored to your character. You will also use generative fill and outpainting to prepare horizontal formats, vertical compositions and 4:5 layouts optimized for platforms like Instagram or TikTok, keeping visual consistency across every frame.

Next, you will move from still images to storytelling. You will design key scenes where your character interacts with different backgrounds, meets a best friend and gradually transforms into a superhero. With Illustrator’s new character features you will explore automatic rotations and alternative views, while in Photoshop you will assemble clean frames that will later be used as starting and ending points in the video.

Finally, you will create an epic transformation sequence in VEO3. You will generate JSON-based prompts with Gemini to control camera moves, duration, style, music and dialogue. Starting from your prepared images, you will animate a scene in which the kid enters a phone booth and emerges as a superhero, ending with a dynamic flight shot. You will also discover the “Ingredients” workflow in VEO3 to combine background, main character and friend into a short scene with spoken dialogue in Spanish.

By the end of the course you will have a complete pipeline to go from sketch to cartoon using AI: character design, 3D-style rendering, image editing, background creation and AI video production. You will be able to create your own animated heroes for illustration, motion projects, content for social networks or personal storytelling, integrating artificial intelligence into your creative process without losing artistic control.