From Real Life to Cartoons: Part 1- Humans

     I absolutely love to draw in a cartoon style. If you don't know what a cartoon style is, the simple definition for a cartoon is this, "make a drawing of (someone) in a simplified or exaggerated way." Whether you make the eyes bigger and more beautiful or accentuate your drawing's rather angular features, you're making a cartoon when you draw something that has crazy proportions and is out of the box. 

    And that's where I have to stop you. Yes, drawing cartoons or fantasy art is awesome, but it also takes practice. 

    How do you practice drawing something that isn't real, or has features that aren't ordinary? The answer to that my friends is that you need to practice drawing in real life. This will be a two-part series that I'm going to do, and this part is for humans. 

    Now, honestly, I'm just starting to draw my own humans, but I have enough practice in the area of drawing fantasy animals that I can tell you the steps to becoming an even better artist by practicing real-life drawings of humans before you go on to cartoons and caricatures. 

     To give you an example of what you should try to do for practice, let me make a theoretical person named Hannah.

    Hannah is fascinated with Disney art and wants to become as good an artist as the people who draw for that movie company. It's her long-term goal to someday work for Disney, and she throws herself into practicing. The only problem is that when she's finished drawing her first character, everything's wrong. She can't figure out exactly what it is, and when she takes this picture to her art teacher, they can immediately see what the problem is. 

    "You have all the proportions wrong dear, here, I'll show you what it is you can do to fix it."

    Hannah had no idea what proportions were before this moment, and as her teacher rifles through her drawers to find something, she looks at her drawing again. Maybe the chin was a little too long, but wasn't that the point of a cartoon? They were supposed to have strange features! But why didn't her drawing look more like a cartoon rather than a messed-up person? Her teacher soon points out the mistake that she has made.

    "You see, cartoons are supposed to have rather imaginary characteristics, but they also have to stay within the bounds of anatomy in order to actually work. You need to first learn anatomy before you start stretching the boundaries."

    Hannah goes home and after flipping the page of her sketchbook, she picks up a pencil and starts to try and draw human face proportions. It takes her weeks of practice to get a decent grip of where the eyes go, the mouth's placement, and how everything shouldn't be too far apart or too close together. Soon she has found her groove with realistic proportions and she is able to confidently copy or create her own face from a reference. And this might be something of what it looks like when she's got her stuff down pat.

(This is not my art.)

        Now, as she has learned the boundaries of anatomy, she realizes, "Hey, I can do this to make her eyes bigger, and maybe push her expression a little further to make it more clear." After lots more practice, not only can Hannah create something cartoonish, but she's very proud of how it turns out. 

    This is one of the many mistakes that can be made by aspiring artists, as they are so eager to put their pencils to use and make a really awesome sketch right off the bat! I for one was definitely that person. I wanted to become great at drawing cats, and humans alike, but I didn't have that much practice and became frustrated when my drawings didn't turn out. So I plead with you fellow artists to please practice from life first, and continually use references and copy real anatomy to become a better artist!

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