Imagination plays an important role in cartoon drawing.
Beginning artists can find success by drawing cartoon faces of people. Once you learn a few basic concepts of drawing, you will discover that drawing cartoon faces can be much easier to draw than real people. Imagination plays an important role in cartoon drawing; once you have learned the basic concepts, experimenting with different shapes and styles creates new characters, villains and heroes.
Instructions
1. Imagine what you want your character to look like. Sometimes you will not know this until you draw each feature. If you have a general idea, begin with that. Think about which feature you want to emphasize in the face, such as the eyes, nose, mouth or hair and head gear. Usually on a cartoon character, at least one or more features are exaggerated.
2. Think about the shape of the head that you want to draw. Begin by sketching the outline of that shape. Always draw lightly in case you need to erase lines. Cartoon face shapes can be circles, ovals, rectangles, triangles, or a combination of any of these shapes. The easiest shape to begin with is a circle.
3. Draw the nose on your shape in the center of the object. This provides a good reference point for the rest of the features on the character. The nose can either be "L"-shaped, a curved line or simply a horizontal line drawn across the shape with two small lines drawn upward on either side of the line.
4. Add the eyes to your face. Since this is a pretend character, the eyes can be oval shaped, circular or more defined as in a human being. Eyes can even be two small dots on the face. Detail the eyes as much as you want to. Drawing small horizontal lines underneath the eyes gives the appearance of creases. Shading in a portion of the eyes further defines the face. Sketch in eyebrows.
5. Conceptualize how you want the mouth to look. You can draw big mouths, open mouths with teeth showing, lips drawn together or simply a curved line up or down to reflect a happy or unhappy expression.
6. Sketch ears on your face. Again think about the effect that you want your character to portray. If the ears are just added for detail, draw two smaller ovals for the ears and call it good. Some cartoon characters don't even have ears, so they are not necessarily a component of the face that you must have.
7. Pencil in the hair. Draw any headgear such as hats, headbands, bows or even crowns for princesses. The hair can simply be an outline surrounding the face, straight lines drawn out to reflect a spiked hairstyle or small shapes if you are focusing more on the head gear.
