Cartoon drawing utilizes exaggeration to convey a message or story.
Cartoons have inspired many artists---including Charles Schultz---to become artists. If you'd like to be an artist who draws cartoons, do what other cartoonists have done---learn from other master cartoonists. You can practice their drawing techniques and study their artwork to understand how they've achieved the results they did. Additionally, if you create these drawings in pencil, you can erase as many mistakes as you might need to until you've mastered each of the techniques used by these comic artists.
Instructions
1. Gather your drawing materials and become familiar with each type. Pencils come in soft or hard lead. Hard lead---designated with an "H"---makes very soft, faint lines. Soft lead---identified with a "B"---creates darker lines and is more suitable for shading.
2. Study your newspaper comic sections. Notice as you look at these reference cartoons how exaggerated they are. The body movements in cartoons convey more information in terms of body language. Use your tracing paper and one of your "B" pencils with a low number (like "2B") to copy a couple of them so that you can get a feel for how the bodies should be drawn in cartoons (see Resource 1).
3. Practice making pencil drawings of basic shapes like circles, squares, cylinders and rectangles. Most objects can be broken down to these most basic elements. If you look at cartoons carefully, you can see how these were built from basic geometric shapes first (see Resource 2).
4. Continue practicing your cartoon drawing techniques by drawing modified stick figures. Draw a line that represents the spine, another one that represents the arms and legs. Connect these lines with little circles that represent the joints. Don't be concerned about your pencil lines being incorrect; you can always erase them. The most important part of this is to capture the basic movement of the body starting with its center lines (see Resource 3).
5. Fill in the body of your stick figure by adding basic geometric shapes. For example, the rib cage is basically a modified circle and the thighs are modified cylinders (see Resource 3).
6. Use the scribble technique to fill in the stick figure bodies of your cartoon characters. Use this technique if you find that you need some additional help in forming the figure that drawing basic shapes does not provide for you. Much like a sculptor who continually adds clay to a sculpture until the form becomes obvious and then scrapes away the unnecessary bits of clay, you can use scribbling the same way. This allows you to "scribble in the details" until you find that you've formed the object you're trying to draw. You'll have extra lines, too, but slowly as you build the drawing, the lines you should keep will emerge among the scribbles. Once they do, erase the extra scribbles and keep the good lines. (see Resource 4).
7. Start your final cartoon pencil drawing by blocking in the basic lines and shapes after you're done with the practice techniques. This drawing should begin as a loose sketch. Once you've drawn the basics, start filling in the details like facial features and shading. Do this until the drawing is complete.
