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Drawing cartoon characters is as methodical and planned an activity as launching a rocket. However, this is just to emphasize (even if overly so) the importance of systematization, not to indicate that cartoon illustration is rocket science!
If you wish your cartoon drawings to be the best they can be, follow these steps and you will be surprised by the results.
Step – 1: Start with blueprints
Art is rumored to follow no methods and artists are reputed to be wily beings. If you would still like to believe in these ideas, make an exception for cartoon drawing. You can’t start cartoon drawing without having any idea the end result and come out with a comic book which is coherent and meaningfully intact.
Get enough sheets of rough paper. First, outline the plot, character by character and page by page. Remember, you are not drawing yet, so don’t waste time in rounding off the characters. You are just working on the ingredients of your comic book- cartoon illustration, flow of the story, segmentation and consistency of the cartoon characters.
Step – 2: Get the frames right
Its time to start working on the blueprints you have made. Drawing cartoon figures on the actual sheet of paper is different from blueprints. Drawing neat frames which fit the cartoons well is a major step toward execution of the conceived ideas. Once that’s done, you should proceed to drawing characters as if they were the final ones. Each frame has to be in complete consistency with the ones preceding and succeeding it.
Step – 3: Finalizing the drawings
No matter how methodical you become about cartoon drawings, loose ends always remain which could not have been resolved at the moment. This is the time when you tie up all such loose ends. Character positions that you have not defined yet, poses that need to be tweaked and replacing character drawing that do not seem to gel so wonderfully – all have to be done now.
Step – 4: Lending the finishing touches
You have spent enough efforts in drawing the cartoons. Now, the time is to make the efforts show. Every minute detail is to be revisited and reworked, if necessary. The shades and the cartoon characters need to be retouched for the pronounced look and clear delineation. By the end of this step, the cartoon character drawings should be ready for coloring. That is why it needs to every feature should be perfected in terms of light and shade.
These are the steps that we have followed in creating Dido and Yappy cartoons. So have a look and you will see that drawing cartoon character pays off when it is done systematically.
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