Cartoon Figure Drawing

[Zita Lifland]

Iwould end up with pages and pages of ugly drawing I couldn't show anyone. None of the drawings were finished or pretty. But once I was taught more solid kind of drawing, I realized how indispensable gesture drawing is to the preliminary process.

The purpose of which is to give life to a final drawing. Without first capturing the essence of a pose or power of an object (yes, other things besides figures can have gestures), you will end up with lifeless drawings.

For example, say your drawing a contrapposto pose. When a person stands, they often favor one leg over another. This causes one hip to be higher than the other. In order to maintain balance, the body counters by making the opposite shoulder higher while making the other lower. Like this:

Finally, once you've done enough, try it on your own. Using a colored pencil, start a drawing, gesture first. Think about the emotion and forces of the pose you want. Once you have that part of the drawing down, draw a cleaner line over that rough drawing, perhaps using one of the characters you drew in the previous shape drawing exercises.

The sheer thought of sharing your knowledge with other artists is admirable to say the least! Bravo Sir/Mam! I randomly found your site and once i did, it awoken my inner artist, long forgotten due to work and other responsibilities.

Please dont stop such beautifull initiative.

It is worth reading the whole article. Thanks for sharing knowledge with all of us. I am an artist. These types or things attracts me. Please find time to have a look to my paintings on please suggest my week area so that i can work on it.

The pleasure of creating a cartoon character is immeasurable. The act of building and developing a character is not just linked to the construction of the figure: each character has its own shape, personality and attributes.

The artist must take into consideration these qualities in order to build a character that is plausible in the eye of the audience. To get some inspiration, have a look at the hundreds of character designs on Envato Elements. Or for a shortcut, try a character creation kit!

That being said, the steps that we follow today are quiet simple. First, draw the basic shape of the figure and then go adding features and other details of the body. This is a procedure that should be followed regardless of your character to be a human, an animal or even an object that you want to bring to life (eg, make a smiling cup).

Proportion is the most important factor to consider in building a cartoon character. The artist should keep in mind the relative size of body parts, because it's based on them we'll define the structural features of our characters. For example, the bully guy has a combative nature, therefore has a small head but his chest is prominent! His arms and legs are strong and well defined, as well as his big jaw. In contrast, a demure character is based on the proportions of a baby with a large head in comparison to body. And all of it in rounded shapes! Other features, such as the forehead and large eyes are responsible for defining their fragile personality. And so on...

Animated studios have the famous practice of using oval shapes to measure the height of a character. For example: A child usually has a head larger than the rest of the body measurements. But the adult has different proportions, which varies according to gender and physique of each character.

When designing (or animating) a character's entire body, it's recommended to keep several drawings of it on a separate piece of paper. Thus, it's possible to have a reference of his proportions to draw it in different poses and actions.

It's common practice among designers to use pear shapes - or similar objects - to build the body format, because of the association that generates inside everybody's head. Actually, this is a common technique among cartoon studios, since several different artists work on the same character and must maintain the correct proportions of each one.

The above examples demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique. You can draw several different characters using the same template! The reason for drawing based on templates is to create an immediate identification in the human brain. Especially in children - where everything should be simplified to be understood. Drawing the body in the format of a pear, helps maintain a dynamic look and adds an overall interest in our character!

Now that we know how to define the forms, we need to define a simple skeleton structure. If you draw any kind of character in a cartoon style, you need to understand the main differences in muscles and bones among different cartoon categories, such as cats, birds and humans. This knowledge is necessary and it will guide us in relation to the character's joints, such as elbows and knees.

When it comes to cartoon, it is important to keep in mind that we should be able to tell a story with each scene that we create. This does not happen often when it comes to photos or realistic drawings. Simply because human beings have a great facility to hide their real intentions.

In cartoon it's different. The gestural and physical characteristics of your characters must be clear even without any dialogue or scene orientation. For that reason, it's such a fascinating and adorable art style!

Does the "rule of pear" work for all cartoon characters that we'll create from now on? Not always. If we reverse that shape, we'll create a sense of strength and power in our character! Notice the examples below.

Well, that's it! Here were presented the processes in draw bodies in a cartoon style. More than that, we also learned how the circular and oval shapes work together to form the body of the characters. We also learned the differences that make up the heroic/strong/bully type and the helpless/fragile type, and how to apply the technique of the pear to achieve these results. Finally, we discover how to apply the "goofy" technique, both in humans and in animals. To close with a golden key, we create a heroic character completely from scratch!

Are you already convinced that can create a complete cartoon character from head to feet? I'm looking forward to seeing them! Share your drawings with us below and, if you still have any questions, I'll be happy to answer it in the comments.

By far, the most commonly used cartoon body shape is "The Bean." Another helpful shape that I personally like to use is a modification of "The Bean," I'll call, "The Bullet." It's a shape I learned from my favorite Figure Drawing teacher, Steve Huston. So let me explain these shapes.

The Bean is exactly what it sounds like. It looks like a bean. It's made up of two spheres. One on top, one on the bottom, separated by a small space, connected by lines on the side. What you end up with is a modified cylinder of sorts. When it bends, it looks like a bean. This shape is meant to represent the torso and hip area together.

The usefulness of The Bean comes from it's flexibility. It can be bent, stretched and twisted easily. It can also be modified to create many different types of torso shapes. It's a fairly standard shape for most traditional, western, animated cartoon characters, from Mickey Mouse and his gang to the Looney Tunes characters.

The Bullet is similar to the The Bean. However, it's just a tad more complicated. It's made up of two shapes, a bullet shaped cylinder facing down, inserted into a soft cornered box hip area. The idea is that the bottom round bullet part of the upper shape immediately creates the shape of the abdominal muscles adding an anatomical feel to your drawing from the start.

This shape is best used when drawing more naturalistic, anatomical cartoon characters such as anime or action adventure characters. But it can also be use to supplement a modified Bean shape to add more naturalism to an exaggerated cartoon shape:

This shape is not unique to me. I got this from The Famous Artist School book on The Figure as well as Walt Reeds book on The Figure. I found this hip shape comes just as handy for cartoons as it does for naturalistic figures.

Once you have these elements down, you can start modifying them to create all kinds of different body types and styles. You can make animals, different types of men, different types of women. It's up to you and your experimentation.

The Bean is pretty much the foundation to most of the Freddy Moore style. It's very easy to see in Looney Tune type characters and Mickey Mouse type. But you can also see a more advance, more naturalistic version of the style in Disney animated features.

The most naturalistic version of the formula comes in play in this anime style. There's far less exaggeration here. The Bullet comes into it's own when drawing in this style. Let's begin with a female torso:

I have been using Affinity Designer for a little over a year now, so I will teach my style to the people on the forum. There are of course many ways to draw, but this will cover a cartoon style. I will teach the style I used originally, and I will teach the style I use now. With the new brush stabilisers implemented in Designer 1.6, I decided to begin a brand new approach, but I will explain what I did for my original style first.

For all of the line work, I used the Pen Tool, because curves created by the Pencil Tool and Brush Tool were too jagged and could not continue lines. However, the Pen Tool does not allow free control, so creating a character entirely from scratch is certainly a challenge. You will need to start smaller.

Above is a long but particulate example. You are probably aware that there are both vector and pixel tools in the program, so I decided to first start off with pixel tools. (In the Brushes tab in the Pixel Persona, I used "Size 2" under the "Assorted" category and with the "Force Pressure" button toggled on.) Before starting the actual character design, Angie, I wanted to have a pose thought out, because drawing a character from scratch in an particular pose may not always be accurate. Therefor, I started out with a figure, then I traced it with a rough sketch, then I used the Pen Tool for the line work but I had to figure how to close each path, and then finally I added coloring.

3a8082e126