How to Sketch Comic Book Characters

Sketching cartoon characters or even making one up of your own can be great fun. There are many books that concentrate on sketching particular comic characters--but simply perusing the Sunday comics and picking your favorites can lead someone to draw comics. My wife grew up copying and sketching Charlie Brown and Lucy from "Peanuts," which got her started on drawing.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Eraser
• India Ink and pen (or roller pen)
• Paper
• Pencils
• Ruler
• T-Square

1. Gather supplies and find a comfortable, flat place to work with plenty of space. Determine what cartoons you want to draw and search for pictorial references, Sunday comics or even library books that will guide in sketching your favorite comic characters.

2. 
    
   An example of a thumbnail sketch and sketching characters out.

   Sketch out your ideas loosely--this will free you up to practice, figure the layout you want to incorporate and how you'll use shapes as building blocks to form characters, fleshing them out and drawing them in greater detail. This process is called a thumbnail sketch, which many artists--like Charles Schulz--have used to determine where to place things and draw them. This can also be done to practice drawing characters on their own.

3. Get some quick lessons on proportion if you are doing realistic human figures or experimenting with how you want your own comic character to look. Having these basic building blocks of drawing skills can help even in copying a famous cartoon character or making up one of your own.

4. 
    
   Start practicing with stick figures.

   While doing stick figure gesture drawings, experiment with motion and movement. "Move" your comic character in different ways. Start with the basics of gesture movements and learn how to flesh the characters out. This will make your cartoon character look much more realistic. Action adds much more to any comic whether you're drawing a character as simple as Bart Simpson or more complex figures like Superman.

5. Flesh out your comic character by sketching out favored shapes. Also, practice drawing your comic character doing different activities. This is the time to experiment with facial expressions to show different emotions, speech patterns and props.

Tips & Warnings

• Explore different graphic novels and comic artists to help you develop your own style and give you character and story ideas. Simple, minimal backgrounds and characters are every bit as effective as their more elaborate, realistic cartoon world counterparts.
• Seek out books that illustrate particular comics, and take you step by step in drawing them. One example is "How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way" (Stan Lee and John Buscema). Other books will show you how to draw everything from popular Sunday comic characters to the world of Disney's inhabitants.
• Accept other people's feedback when you show them your cartoon characters, but don't let it overwhelm the vision that you want to explore for them. Sometimes, the biggest successes go against the popular grain.