The Making of a Cartoonish Character [Basic]

Cartoon style illustrations are so cute and distinctive, aren’t they?

In this article, I’m going to show you how to draw a cartoon style character’s body in a [basic] chapter!

 

Draw a rough structure

It’s difficult to start out with a cartoon style drawing in one shot, so start out with a rough drawing of the composition you want to draw, even if it’s a messy line.

It’s hard to see if they cover the color of the line drawing, so I recommend drawing in a color other than black!
You can use any color, even bright colors.

The trick is to draw the head, body, arms, hands and other parts separately.

In the cartoon style, each part of the body is unique, so we should emphasize the characteristic part.

In this section, we can summarize the body features that are often seen in cartoon style illustrations.
Large limbs.
Extremely long or short legs.
Extremely thin or overweight
The parts are angular.
And so on.

First, you should decide on the characteristics of the character to make it “like a cartoon” before you draw it.

In this article, I’ve drawn the basic character without any differences in gender, but it’s best to make the legs longer or draw a larger body to suit your character’s needs, as gender and settings can make a big difference.

This time I tried to keep in mind that both men and women often have the same thing in common: large limbs.

 

Aligning the lines

Once the general structure of the character is decided, you can connect the parts you’ve just drawn and fix them up.

Since this will be the base of the line drawing, it’s easier to draw the line drawing afterwards if you use finer lines than the previous one.

 

Use a different color than the one you used earlier.
It’s hard to tell if they are similar, so it’s better to have two colors completely separate.

Add a new layer on top of the base layer and set the opacity of the base layer to about 50%.

This will make the base lines look lighter and easier to draw from above.

Earlier, the lines were separated for the wrists and hands, ankles and feet, etc., but now I’m going to connect those parts and draw them together.

It’s not a line drawing yet, so you don’t need to draw the lines nicely, but try to draw the shape as nicely as possible.

The first hand shape was a circle, but this time I separated the thumb from the other fingers.
This will make it easier to get the shape when you are drawing the lines.

 

Line Drawing

Once the shape is taken, it’s time to start line drawing.

In the line drawing process, hide the base layer you drew at the beginning and reduce the opacity to 50% as before for the layer that took the shape.

Since the line drawing will be the final body border, draw it in the color you want to use for the final character’s line color, such as black.

Using the shaped illustration as a reference, draw the line drawing while modifying the details.

This time I drew an angular hand, which is often seen in cartoon style illustrations.
It looks like that all at once.

The characteristics of line drawing in cartoon style are
The lines are strong.
The line has a strong/weakness to it.
And so on.

Most of cartoon style illustrations are thick and the lines are well connected.
Even the lines in this one are on the thin side, and if you want to make the illustration more comical, you can make it as thick as you want it to be, which I think is cute.

 

Summary

Lastly, I drew a face that looks like that with some color and a little shadow.

I just needed to get the body shape, facial expressions, clothes, and other features one by one to create an adorable cartoon-like character!

This time it was the basics, but please try to learn the basics and apply them!

-Related Article-.
→ To The Making of Cartoon Characters [Expressions]</a >