How to Design a Cartoon

There are several reasons why you might want to create your own cartoon character. Perhaps you need a cartoon for a news story or even a cartoon strip to become a regular edition to the Sunday funnies. Maybe you want to create a cartoon for a health-care-related pamphlet, as a cartoon might be an especially useful way of helping to alleviate fear and promote understanding of a complicated subject to children. Whatever your reason, there are a number of things you need to think about when setting out to design a cartoon character.

Things You'll Need

• A graphics program

Instructions

1. Decide what type of cartoon you want to create. Brainstorm ideas related to your cartoon's theme, which will be determined primarily as to the purpose of your cartoon. For example, Smoky the Bear is a mascot for the U.S. National Park System. As such, this cartoon character is used to relay public service announcements as to how to be safe while enjoying the nation's national parks. On the other hand, perhaps you want your cartoon's theme to be focused on being funny or silly, such as with the Simpsons.

2. Decide on the cartoon "style" you want to use. For example, when creating cartoons for children as the primary audience, characters are often depicted with exaggerated heads, hands and feet. With the Peanuts' character Charlie Brown, it's easy to see that his head is not in proportion to the body. With anime, characters have large eyes and extravagant hair, which are often in contrast with smaller features such as the mouth and nose.

3. Utilize a good graphics program such as Photoshop, Art Rage or CorelDraw to create your cartoons. While you can draw you cartoons in a sketchbook, a program such as Art Rage allows you to take your cartoons to a more professional level. Art Rage also has a tracing and a reference option that can be useful.

4. Place separate parts of characters on different layers, enabling you to more easily make changes to details. Layers also let you create backgrounds and place your characters against them, reusing them as needed as familiar backdrops if you are, for instance, creating a weekly cartoon for a newspaper.

Resources

• Photoshop
• Art Rage