Character design is a growing trend in web graphics and an important way to add a little life and branding to a site.

Two sites that offer some great examples of character design are Tapbots, which sells iPhone applications, and Firehost, a PCI-compliant hosting provider.

As a result of this trend, we have received a few requests for tutorials about creating advanced characters. In response to the requests, I will be offering a series of tutorials—starting with this one—aimed at demonstrating how to create character graphics.

In this video, I will show you an example of a character design I did of a "whistling yeti" and use it to explain the process of taking a character from a sketch, to a Photoshop document, to a color Illust...