Intro
Bored? Why not draw your very own cartoon character? Drawing is an excellent way to alleviate stress and boredom, and it also assists your creativity! Read this article to learn how to draw your very own cartoon character!
Character design can be a challenging beast to take on. Developing your own character from scratch involves a lot of creative thinking. Although a number of traditional characters familiar to all of us through animations, films, and advertising look uncomplicated, a great deal of skill and effort will have gone into making them so effective.
But aside from tidy lines and quickly readable functions, what else do you need to consider for your character style? There’s knowing what to overemphasize and what to play down, what to contribute to offer a tip of background and depth, and what to do to establish character. And then there’s the matter of the technicalities of how to draw your character’s style.
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Practice by copying real characters
Not everyone has the capability to develop Disney quality masterpieces when it pertains to drawing characters. However, everyone can have a go!
If you don’t normally do a lot of drawing, then you may want to start by looking at existing cartoon characters and copying those styles.
It doesn’t matter if you’re terrific at drawing or if you’ve never ever attempted- simply have a go at copying drawings to get your abilities up to snuff. Try mixing and matching different expressions, eyes, etc. to create something brand-new and distinct.
When creating your own character, you shouldn’t copy existing styles, but copying the techniques of professionals can help you learn how to create clean lines and use small details to communicate the personality and emotional state of your character.
Designing the head
The head is often the most important part of any drawn character. It’s what communicates the character’s emotions at any given time and can also say a lot about the personality type of the character.
Just look at some famous animated movie heroes and villains. Usually, villains have sharper faces and heroes tend to look very friendly, just from the shape of their heads.
When drawing the head for your own character, you’ll need to make sure that the face has plenty of room for facial features and expressions.
It’s handy to think about an animation head as consisting of two fundamental shapes. Draw a sphere on top of the neck. Add a second sphere down part of the very first sphere. This sphere should be flattened to practically half the height of the very first sphere.
Now that you know how to make the basic shape of the head, you can add information such as eyes, a mouth, a nose, and ears.
Decide in which direction the eyes will be looking. Draw an oval in that spot and make a small mark where you’ll later draw the pupil.
When drawing eyes, ensure to curve them along the light pencil line. This will make certain your character appears like he’s looking in the designated direction.
Next, draw in an oval nose and two circular ears, the whole time the line in between the two initial spheres.
Finally, draw a curved line for a mouth under the nose.
Once you have a basic face, you can draw many different copies. This will give you the chance to draw different facial expressions for different emotional states: angry, happy, sad, anxious, tired, etc.
Draw the face over and over. You’ll want the drawings of your character to be consistent so that it will be instantly recognizable to viewers.
Accessories
A character can communicate many subtle things through different means as well, not just through their face.
Props and clothes can help to emphasize character qualities and their background. For example, shabby clothing can be utilized for poor characters, and lots of diamonds and bling might work well for unsavory rich ones.
Accessories can likewise be more literal extensions of your character’s personality, such as a parrot on a pirate’s shoulder or a maggot in an evil spirit’s skull.
This is why it’s so important to understand who your character is, their likes and dislikes and even where they live.
All of this knowledge will give you hints as to how the character might dress and in what kind of world they live.
Does your character live in the past? Do they live in the future? Maybe they even live on a fictional alien planet.
Knowing as much as possible about who your character is will help you translate those details to visual cues in the character design.
Deciding on attitude
You’ll also need to decide on your character’s overall attitude and their role in the story.
If you’re just looking to make a character based on yourself, then you already have a leg up on character creation, as you can just base their style on your own.
But if you’re creating an entirely original character, it will take much longer to work out what kind of person your character is.
Just look at popular 90s cartoon characters. Many of them related directly to children, either through their age or their personality type.
Many were loud and rebellious, endearing them to children viewers who might feel the same way.
Who do you want your character to appeal to? What personality traits does that audience share? How can you integrate those traits into your character?
Ask for feedback
Finally, once you have a couple of different versions of your character, don’t be afraid to ask for feedback from friends and other artists.
They’ll have many suggestions for how you can change the character’s appearance or their wardrobe.
Ask them what kind of person the character is, based just on how they look. This will be valuable information as you create alternate versions of your character in the future.
