Everybody wants to learn how to draw comic book characters. The secret to doing it well is actually much simpler than you would think. All you need is a certain kind of paper. It is called tracing paper, and you can get 100 sheets for five dollars or less.
To some people, using tracing paper may seem like cheating, but actually copying a master's work is a time-honored tradition among artists, and a superb way to learn the secrets of your trade. You use tracing paper by putting a sheet of the semi transparent tracing paper over whatever image you want to draw. And then you follow your pencil along the partially covered lines underneath the tracing paper, tracing the lines as you go, thus re-creating the image.
For your first trace, just copy all the lines, pulling the paper away every few minutes to see how you're progressing. You won't end up with a very attractive image, but you will be teaching your eye and your hand to work together in a co-operative way to create the image that you want to be able to draw freehand. After you've done your first trace, you can either move on to do a second trace that looks better than the first one, or you can try to draw the image freehand.
You will find that even with one practice trace under your belt, you measure the distance between the lines were accurately. The same image that you had trouble drawing before suddenly starts to look a lot better. Give yourself some congratulations. You can either keep practicing freehand or you could go back and do some more traces until you really master the way the original artist created the cartoon.
That's how to copy existing cartoons. Even if you want to create your own cartoons, it's a great way to learn how the masters drew their cartoon characters. But you probably want to learn how to draw your own. That takes an awful lot of practice, but here are some pointers to get you started.
- Start sketching everything you see.
- Start simplifying images so that you can render, say, a cat, in less than six lines.
- Study the character of your subjects, and try to show animals' and peoples' characters through your simplified drawings. This may mean making some body parts, like hands or feet or ears, larger than they are in reality, in order to accentuate different personality traits of your subject. It also means studying the body language of people and animals so that you can depict some of their emotions simply by how they hold themselves.
- Being able to convey emotion in your comic book characters is essential, so you should study facial expressions and learn how to convey a smile or anger or surprise with just a few lines of your pencil.
- Learn to tell a story. As a cartoon book artist, your images convey a story. So in addition to being able to simplify images and convey emotions, you need to create images that tell a story in a clear simple way. The time-honored technique for doing this is to use frames, usually 3-6 frames for each cartoon strip. Let yourself do a couple of drafts before you finalize each phase of the story you are telling in a single frame. Also be willing to redraw your cartoons when you get a better idea for how to illustrate a certain part of your story.
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