Joel Hickerson, grindog.com. Today we're going to discuss tips on drawing cartoons. First thing, start off with a pencil, to draw your construction elements of your cartoon. And remember to draw very lightly, so what I like to do to start with is a line of action. And say there it is. It's simple as that. And then you draw your figure around the line of action. And remember cartoons are very exaggeration oriented, very expressive. And it usually typifies an emotion or personifies an emotion. So what we'll draw is a guy, maybe with his mouth open, his eyes wide open and just basically flailing around here, on an exercise in exaggeration emotion. The personality you want to take that into consideration, maybe he's a little bit frantic. A frantic guy overall. Clothes are kind of wrinkled, he's a fine example of an emotional expressive guy. Okay. Now we have all our construction elements in place, we go back with a dark pencil. And don't worry about erasing until you're done, 'cause what you're going to do in a cartoon usually is build your construction lines, come up, create the emotion, illustrate the emotion or the expression, and then flesh it out. But everything, especially on an emotion like this, like a frantic emotion, everything seems to be blowing up from the center and working its way out. The arms are flying out, the fingers, the hands, maybe you got buttons popping off. The legs are flying out. He's actually up off the ground. Like as with any emotion, you pick the things that best typify it and that's what you illustrate, especially in cartoons. And that's it. And now if you've done your job with the construction lines, and drawn lightly, it should come off very easily. And leave you with something that's very easy to come back and add color to, maybe some cross hatching shadows. A lot of things that kind of compliment your drawing more and make it even more expressive or give it more personality or typify the emotion even better. And that's some tips on cartooning.
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