How to Draw the Head on 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, so now we crafted our face, we've got our eyes, nose, mouth, eyebrows; we've got our straight expression. Now what we're going to want to do is start giving this guy a bit of a face. Now this is also for the delicate things. It will definitely effect how his proportions precede the face from this point on. If you make it too big, you're going to have to obviously give him bigger proportions. If you make it to skinny you're going to have to him a lanky dude. So we're going to back to our rough sketch page here, so again what I would to is, I would start with the eyes and just kind of be careful how you go about the chin. The chin is actually the most important part of the face in my opinion. Once you kind of got the chin, you know how to build the rest of around it like I just did over here. This is a safe chill chin right here, not to fat, not to chubby, and you're sort of just follow the rest of the head up and around. Now again, there are a thousand different ways you can do this. Like if you wanted to, you wanted to do a little bit more of an outrageous character, you'd give him kind of a puffy round, like almost a chipmunk chin. Give him littler ears. Some more expressive eyebrows. Right here you almost have Garfield going on, see, and that's just a simple chin choice. Most of these characters start out the same. The eyes usually start out the same, but if you want to create like more of a grumpy character, like an old man, give him one of those long, pointy chins and maybe ears that kind of follow the chin. Make him irate, pissed off old guy. So for our guy, again I'm just going to go not too crazy here and I'm just going to give him a basic, regular chin. I consider the ears to be part of the chin and the head process just because their so directly connected to the chin. I mean it's just like the natural next step, so I'm not going to devote and entire section to ears. They?re almost always pretty basic. I mean, you can obviously use some variations, but for the most part they're not going to be too crazy. So we just kind of go up and around and at this point I'm not going to do too much up here because I wanted to leave myself a little bit of creative room to draw the hair in there, but for now we got our rough face and that's all we really need. So we'll actually be moving on to hair now in the next step, so kind of get in to the hair area next."