PCC 2: Face it, you wanna draw
Drawing a good face is absolutely vital to making your cartoon shine. Here, the Pocket Cartoon Course gives you the basics of drawing a variety of expressions on your first cartoon character.
Today, we’ll combine lessons 1 and 2 since they both focus on the face. The first on the straight-on view, the second on the side view.
These are great tips, and now we’ll offer you a few more.
SHAPES: An oval isn’t the only type of head you can draw. Try drawing all sorts of head shapes and then adding the typical eyes, nose, ears and mouth. What sort of shapes are we talking about? We say go crazy: circles, squares, triangles, rectangles, banana-shapes, pear-shapes, peanut shapes. They all work, especially for animals.
EYES: Cartoonists draw eyes in a ton of different ways. Some do “button eyes” like the ones at left. Others use big wide disks with pupils in the middle. Check out the different ways they are drawn in your local newspaper for some more ideas.
LINES: Drawing lines around a characters mouth, forehead and eyes tend to make them look older. The fewer lines there are, the younger they look.
EARS: A real ear is tough to draw. It has all sorts of swirls and folds. Cartoon ears are much easier. Just draw a circle and put a sideways “y” toward the top of it. Easy as can be!
HAIR: You never need to draw every strand of hair on a person’s head. Just draw a few for people to get the idea and then outline the general shape of their ‘do.
NOSES: You can draw noses in a bazillion different ways. They can look like a button, a “C” or even an upside-down “7″ on men. Remember, female characters and children usually get much smaller and less-detailed noses.
EMOTION: Happy, sad, angry, laughing, surprised, proud. Those are all the types of emotions you will need to convey in your drawings. Look at your newspaper’s comics and try to figure out what emotion each character is conveying without reading the words. Soon you will see the secrets of portraying those emotions in your own characters!
PRACTICE: You should work at drawing all the time you can. Just grab a piece of paper whenever you’re bored and start filling it with a crowd of people. Mastering the human face, even in cartoons, is truly important.
You’ll notice that none of the characters shown in the Pocket Cartoon Course are girls. That’s because girls have special rules to make sure they look feminine and beautiful.
With that in mind, we suggest you take a look at the video below and follow through with the entire series of videos about drawing girls.
By the time you’re done with it, you will have some wonderful female characters!
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