How to Draw a Cartoon Face

This is an activity where you can get in touch with your inner child if you have passed out of that phase of your life. This is where it's okay to play with normal proportions and experiment to your heart's content with the way people look. Stereotypes can be very useful to you as your create cartoon faces.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Think outside the box as you approach this project. Where a normal human face has set proportions that must be adhered to pretty closely for realistic effect, the cartoon face has any number of possible proportions to play with.

2. Watch people at a mall or other place where you can have access to lots of individuals. Look at all the faces and in a sketchbook make quick visual notes of the face shapes that you see. By doing this, you notice that there are square faces, circular faces, oval faces, squashed faces and triangular faces. Let your eyes see past the reality of the proportions that we all share.

3. Set yourself the task for the first few days of drawing these basic geometric shapes and then fitting face features into them. By forcing yourself to do this, you gain a greater understanding of the possibilities that cartooning offers you for self-expression and artistic exploration.

4. Focus on the eyes next. Again, watch people and notice how eyes are not all alike. Some eyes are more closed, some more open, some almond-shaped and some slanted up or down, and some are small while others seem especially large. In your sketchbook, practice drawing all of these types of eyes in exaggerated form.

5. Look for noses and mouths the same way you looked for eyes and face shapes. Again, sketchbook in hand, make all the quick visual notes you can by observing all the noses and mouths you can. Lips are thick or thin, tight or soft. Noses are long and short, bumpy and smooth, curved, straight and so on. There are many possibilities to play with.

Tips & Warnings

• Drawing cartoon faces comes down to practice. While others can give you ideas for how to approach such a project, only you can get there through your own observation and practice and your own ability to think outside your own box to create new pictures.
• Pay attention to cartoons all around you, especially the editorial cartoons, so that you can see how professional artists take people from real life and exaggerate their features to create wonderful cartoon representations.