Awuradwoa Afful is a Ghanaian-Canadian artist, designer, animator and ceramicist, born and raised in Toronto, whose work moves between illustration, visual development, animation, and clay. Her practice feels expansive but grounded—anchored in drawing, but constantly testing what a character can be across media.
“I’ve had a fascination with art and animation since I was a child,” she says, which feels less like a nostalgic aside and more like the engine behind everything she makes.
Drawing as a Way of Thinking
Before animation pipelines and design briefs, there was drawing. Afful completed a BFA in Drawing and Painting at OCAD University, and it shows. Her lines have the confidence of someone who learned to look slowly: figures are constructed with care, bodies feel weighted, gestures feel observed rather than invented.
Later, she completed the Animation program at Seneca Polytechnic, stepping into industry contexts while keeping that fine art sensibility intact. Since 2017, she’s been working in animation, balancing freelance roles in visual development, design and illustration with personal projects that move at a different pace.
Soft Figures, Strong Structure
Afful’s characters are immediately recognizable. Long limbs, gentle silhouettes, slightly exaggerated proportions—but never cartoonish in a loud way. Instead, they feel quietly stylized, like people seen through memory rather than through a camera.nHer palette often leans toward muted pastels and earthy tones, with soft lighting that feels painterly rather than digital. There’s a tenderness to her color choices, but also control. Nothing feels accidental. What stands out most is mood. Her figures often look inward, caught in pauses rather than action. In a field where character design often chases energy and spectacle, Afful leans into stillness—and that stillness feels radical.
Diaspora Without the Noise
Afful’s work sits within a growing wave of African and diasporic artists redefining representation on their own terms. Her characters are often Black, but not as symbols or statements. They exist with specificity and subtlety, carrying identity without being reduced to it. This understated approach feels deliberate. Rather than declaring identity, she lets it sit inside gesture, hair, posture, and atmosphere—small cues that feel lived-in rather than performed.
From Screen to Clay
Alongside digital work, Afful is also a ceramicist, translating drawn characters into physical forms. Working in clay brings a different relationship to volume, gravity, and touch—qualities that quietly feed back into her illustration and animation practice.
There’s something compelling about this loop: characters imagined on paper, then shaped by hand, then returned to screens. It complicates the idea of “digital art” as something immaterial, grounding it in physical process.
Building a Long Story: Fractions
Afful is currently developing a graphic novel, Fractions, supported by a Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation grant. Long-form narrative feels like a natural next step for her work. Her characters already feel like they belong to stories that unfold slowly, across panels and pages. Graphic novels demand patience, and Afful’s visual language—introspective, atmospheric, quietly cinematic—seems built for that temporal stretch.
A Practice That Resists Urgency
In an industry obsessed with speed, productivity, and constant output, Afful’s work feels unhurried. It’s not flashy; it’s attentive. Her characters feel like they are thinking, waiting, existing—offering a counterpoint to the hyper-kinetic aesthetics of much contemporary character design. Afful represents a generation of African and diasporic artists who move fluidly between fine art, animation, publishing, and craft. Her practice doesn’t collapse these categories; it lets them coexist. Her characters don’t perform. They inhabit. And in doing so, they quietly expand what contemporary character design can feel like.
