Aaron Blaise's Creature Art Teacher: Learning Animal Drawing and Creature Design from a Disney Legend

Aaron Blaise is one of the most credentialed art instructors teaching online today. As a Disney Animation Studios veteran with over 20 years of experience, Aaron worked as an animator and supervising animator on some of the most beloved animated films ever made—including The Lion King, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Mulan. His Creature Art Teacher platform translates that extraordinary professional experience into accessible, practical courses that teach animal drawing, creature design, and animation principles to artists at all skill levels.

What makes Aaron's instruction uniquely valuable is not just his Disney pedigree but his deep, genuine expertise in animal anatomy and behavior. Throughout his career at Disney, Aaron specialized in bringing animal characters to life—understanding not just how animals look but how they move, how their muscles and skeletal structures create the forms we see on the surface, and how to imbue animal characters with personality, emotion, and narrative purpose. This combination of anatomical knowledge, animation expertise, and storytelling instinct is extraordinarily rare, and it infuses every course on the Creature Art Teacher platform.

Animal Drawing: Understanding Anatomy from the Inside Out

Aaron's animal drawing courses represent some of the most comprehensive instruction available in this specialized discipline. Rather than teaching students to copy the surface appearance of animals from photographs, Aaron teaches a structural approach to animal drawing that begins with understanding the skeletal and muscular anatomy underlying every animal form.

Students learn the skeletal structures of major animal groups—understanding how bone architecture determines the proportions, movement capabilities, and characteristic silhouettes of different species. From this skeletal foundation, the courses build upward through muscular anatomy, showing how muscles attach to bones and create the surface forms that artists observe and draw. This inside-out approach means that students develop the ability to draw animals convincingly from any angle and in any pose—not just the poses they've seen in reference photographs.

The instruction covers species-specific anatomy across a wide range of animal types, including big cats, canines, horses, birds, marine mammals, and other groups. Each species receives focused attention, with Aaron demonstrating the specific anatomical features, proportional relationships, and movement patterns that distinguish one animal type from another. Gesture drawing techniques teach students to capture animal movement and energy in quick sketches, developing the ability to convey the dynamic quality of living creatures in a few confident lines.

Throughout the animal drawing curriculum, Aaron emphasizes the connection between anatomy and expression—showing how understanding an animal's physical structure enables artists to create poses and facial expressions that convey emotion, personality, and narrative meaning. This is the animator's perspective on animal drawing, and it produces results that are more alive and more communicative than purely observational approaches.

Creature Design: Grounding Fantasy in Reality

Aaron's creature design courses teach the art of creating believable fantasy creatures—dragons, monsters, aliens, and other imaginary beings that feel grounded in biological reality even though they don't exist. This is a discipline that requires both creative imagination and rigorous understanding of real-world animal anatomy, and Aaron's unique combination of artistic creativity and anatomical expertise makes him an ideal teacher for this subject.

The instruction covers hybrid creature design—the process of combining anatomical features from multiple real animals to create creatures that are original and fantastical yet structurally plausible. Students learn to think about creature design in terms of environmental adaptation and ecology—designing creatures whose physical features make sense for specific habitats, survival strategies, and behavioral patterns. This ecological thinking produces creature designs that feel authentic and internally consistent, even in fantasy contexts.

Character development for creatures is another key focus. Aaron teaches students to give their creatures personality, backstory, and visual identity—the same skills he used to bring animated animal characters to life at Disney. A well-designed creature is not just anatomically plausible; it communicates something about who it is and what its role is in the story or world it inhabits.

Animation Principles Applied to Creatures

Drawing on his decades of experience at Disney Animation Studios, Aaron teaches animation principles as they apply specifically to animal and creature movement. Students learn how different animals move—the mechanics of quadruped locomotion, the physics of flight, the fluid dynamics of swimming—and how to translate that understanding into convincing animated movement.

The courses cover walk cycles for various creature types, weight and balance (making creatures feel physically grounded and real), facial animation (conveying emotion through animal and creature expressions), and action poses that capture dynamic movement with energy and clarity. For students interested in animation careers, these courses provide foundational knowledge that is directly applicable to professional character animation work.

Both Traditional and Digital Instruction

Aaron teaches in both traditional and digital media, reflecting his own versatile practice. Traditional drawing instruction covers pencil, charcoal, and other physical media, while digital courses demonstrate professional workflows in Photoshop and other digital tools. Students learn texture creation techniques for rendering realistic fur, scales, feathers, and skin surfaces in both traditional and digital contexts.

This dual-media approach ensures that students develop fundamental drawing skills that are independent of any specific tool, while also gaining practical proficiency in the digital workflows used in professional animation and entertainment production.

The Instructor's Unique Credibility

The value of Aaron Blaise's courses is inseparable from his extraordinary professional credentials. When Aaron demonstrates how to draw a lion, he does so as someone who spent years studying and animating lions for The Lion King. When he teaches creature design, he draws on decades of experience creating characters for some of the most successful animated films in history. This is not theoretical instruction—it is practical knowledge transferred directly from one of the highest levels of professional practice in the animation industry.

Aaron's teaching style is engaging, clear, and generous. He demonstrates techniques step-by-step, shares behind-the-scenes insights from his Disney career, and communicates complex anatomical and design concepts in ways that are accessible without being oversimplified. The courses include high-quality reference materials, anatomy charts, and practice assignments that support structured skill development.

The Bottom Line

Aaron Blaise's Creature Art Teacher platform offers something genuinely rare in online art education: instruction in animal drawing, creature design, and animation from a Disney veteran whose professional credentials are beyond question. For anyone who wants to draw animals convincingly, design fantasy creatures that feel real, or understand the animation principles that bring characters to life, Aaron's courses represent an exceptional educational investment.