How to Draw Cartoons: An easy step-by-step guide

Introduction

Hi, I’m Adam Clay and I’ll be your host for this book! I’ll show you how to draw excellent cartoons all of your own.

Step-by-step drawings

I’ll show you how to draw things such as people and animals using simple four-step diagrams. I’ll use blue and red for the first few steps so that you can clearly see what to do. When you draw the pictures yourself, don’t use red and blue pencil crayons, as these don’t rub out! Just use a normal lead pencil.

Step 1 shows you how to sketch the rough outline of your figure; lines are shown in blue.

Step 2 gives more definition to your rough shapes and adds detail; lines are shown in red, over the top of the blue lines.

Step 3 shows the finished inked drawing, with all the detail in place; these lines are black. All blue and red lines are rubbed out.

Step 4 is the final colour drawing. Your cartoon is complete!

The right tools

I like to use a hard pencil (H or 2H) for my initial sketches and a softer pencil (HB or 2B) for adding more detail.

Pencil crayons, marker pens or felt tips are great for colouring cartoons. Watercolour paint can also give a really nice effect but remember to use fairly thick paper to soak up the water. If you’re a geek like me you could even try scanning your drawings and colouring them up on the computer!

Finding your own style

You may have heard it before, but it’s true that everyone has their own unique style of drawing. And so do you – even if you don’t know it yet! This book will give you lots of helpful hints, but it’s important to develop your own drawing style as you go through the book. This will create the magic ‘individuality factor’ which will make your artwork exciting and unique.

I’ll be giving you exercises throughout this book such as changing figures, dressing characters and adding finishing touches to scenes, to help you develop your own style.

You’ll be dressing this chap on p50!

You’ll be transforming this princess into an evil witch on p59!

A history

Before you start drawing your own cartoons, it’s good to learn when they came about and why some characters have remained popular from their creation to today.

Felix the Cat (right) was popular in the silent film era of the 1920s. He was drawn very simply and his body and face were very adaptable, allowing for highly exaggerated expressions and movements.

The Belgian artist Hergé created Tin-Tin (above), a young, adventurous reporter, for a comic strip in 1929. Hergé drew his characters with quite a lot of detail and gave them good action poses.

Peanuts (below) was created in 1950 by Charles M. Schulz for a newspaper comic strip and remained in print for 50 years! The characters were simple in their construction but were still expressive – Schulz developed a style that worked for both printed cartoons and moving animation. Peanuts marked the start of cartoons moving from print to TV and film.

Modern cartoons

During the 1930s and 1940s Warner Brothers Studios made short cartoons for the cinema featuring characters such as Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny. These characters combined animal features with human characteristics and expressions. This became a very familiar style of cartoon, and Warner Brothers animations were viewed on TV around the world.