Basic Cartoon Styles

Video Transcript

"To begin our cartoon expressions, first you have to understand what is it that you want to draw. Everyone's cartoon styles are different. If you've read the Sunday comics, they don't all look alike. They all have different ways and shapes and forms they like to use to draw things like noses, and mouthes and thinks like that. So experiment and see kind of what shapes you enjoy drawing. We're going to start off today by drawing a basic neutral expression. This is going to be that template on which we're going to build everything else we're going to draw today. So lets get started. We're going to take our felt tip pen here, now an option throughout all sorts of these various exercises is to use a pencil instead. This is something you can erase it if you're not as confident in your lines, and that's no problem at all. But I'm going to be doing it with a felt pen today. We're going to start off with a neutral expression, and I suggest starting with the eyes. There are various ways at drawing the eyes. Now you're going to see the eyes I'm going to draw today, are going to be kind of like these two almost oval shapes, and they meet and they don't separate, there's actually connecting point. Then inside of these I'm going to draw two eyes, now we have a nice little set of eyes. Let's draw the eyes partially closed because it's going to be a neutral expression and I have the line go up a little bit, not directly across. I also put in some eyebrows, in similar oval shapes, right above the eyes. I'm also going to draw in a nose, it's going to be a very subtle U shape down here. Now for the mouth it's going to be just straight across, because again this is neutral. And now we're going to put in the ears. Now the ears I usually like to see the same distance here between the nose and the eyes go out along the side here and then draw in some ears on both sides. Now this is a natural jumping off point to the hair. There's different styles of hair; this we're going to have our guy have his hair go off to the side, and then come up over the top, and then the same thing on this side. So that means you can put in more side burns and make it more defined, but it really depends on your style. Next we're going to put in the cheek and the jaw sides, basically I have it by doing one line on this side coming down by the ears, mimic this, mirror this on the other side, and come down around on the jaw, and then down for the chin, you can put a little dimple under the chin. Now you have a completely neutral expressions. Some of the key features you're going to notice a lot of horizontal lines. The eyebrows are horizontal, the top of the eyelids are largely horizontal, even the balance of the eyes, the eyes themselves, the pupil and the irises, horizontal, the nose, again you can see where I get the horizontal, and of course the mouth and the chin line, that's because it's supposed to be a very sedate face. Now practice this though until you've absolutely mastered the neutral expression of your cartoon character that you want to draw today. Because now we're going to take this face, and we're going to make it do a whole bunch of other crazy expressions. But helping have the neutral established, will let you be able to go back and see how you want to manipulate and change the original template."