How to Visualize Drawing a Cartoon Character

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Danny Page and I'm here on behalf of Expert Village. In this series I'm going to teach you how to draw basic cartoon characters. Alright, moving on to what I like to call pre-visualization, where you basically stare down the page and figure out exactly what your dimensions are going to be. Now one thing you're always going to want to have when just sketching out random ideas and particularly creating new characters. If you are interested in writing a comic script or an animated series or this is sort of the place where all cartoon artists, visual artists, you know animators go to create the characters from scratch. What they will typically do is, they'll have their canvas, sort of the page that they'll end up presenting to whoever it is that they're going to be showing these characters to in their initial form and then just a couple pages either above or below it they'll have their sketch page. Basically where all their ideas can be put down and won't have to worry about it looking neat or messy. In fact this page is going to be getting really, really crazy messed up cause we're going to be jotting down just basic ideas as far as dimensions are concerned. We're not concerned about shapes, just getting ideas down basically is the only thing we'll be doing this. So your ideas can kind of flow you know as you kind like get ideas for dimensions and like you mess with certain things and you might decide you know to do with a different shape like, create something a little bit more unusual and these are just rough sketches trying to get a basic idea as to what it is we're trying to do here. And there's really no bad ideas on this page. It's all just free flowing imagination. We're going to come back to this page quite a bit as we go. But this is basically your brainstorming page and this page is going to be your finished product fed page that we're actually going to sketch out the actual finished sketch on. So we'll be kind of rotating back and forth between the two pages. So good to know that. Make sure you have a couple pages available to you, either go out and buy yourself your own sketch book which you know any self respecting cartoon artist ought to have one, but if you just need a couple of pages that will do the job too. So here we go."