How To Draw Cartoon Characters

Regardless if you want to draw men women or children the basic construction of a cartoon character can be approached using one of a number of simple methods. Any of the methods outlined below should help you build a simple pencil outline of the character you are drawing right from the start. Once you have this outline you can easily add details or make changes to the character's pose and attitude, all before committing the cartoon permanently to ink.

Start simply when approaching your cartoons, there's no point in trying to draw the head in detail, the eyes mouth and nose etc, until you have a rough outline for the body and the pose of your character. Start with a basic outline. This is hugely important.

  

Anyone can draw an oval, it's just a badly drawn circle! Try some exercises creating human shapes from simple ovals in pencil, like the examples below. Many cartoonists create their characters in this way.

Similar to ovals and circles above but I often feel the sticks are more expressive and better help me to capture the particular pose. This may be because in using sticks we are breaking the body down into something which more closely resembles our bone structure, where the oval forms in method 1 seem less exact when trying to imagine a pose. I also feel that using sticks for arms and legs means we can introduce angles more easily, resulting in an outline with more character.

Finally I often use a combination of both, generally starting with the purely stick figure above. The oval for the head and an oval for the body are then added, leaving both the legs and arms as sticks at this stage. This allows me to get a feel for how fat or slim our character will be but keeps the more expressive form of the sticks for the arms and legs, the extremities conveying the majority of the character in any active pose.

  

Pet Portraits and Dog & Cat Art