How to Create Cartoon Characters

Want to Create Cartoon Characters but don’t know how? In this post, we’ll show you different ways to Create Cartoon Characters. These methods and tools can be used by anyone, even if they have never drawn anything before.

The tools and ideas in this article are easy to find and may give you different results depending on what you want to achieve and how much money you have. If you don’t want to use real photos of yourself in online profiles and avatars, you could make yourself into a cartoon character.

People will find it fun and different if you make yourself look like a cartoon in your online profiles. You don’t have to pay an artist to draw your cartoons because there are so many free web services. All you have to do is upload your photo or play mix-and-match.

Ways to Create Cartoon Characters

Doodle the Basic Shape

This first step tells you to loosen your grip on the pencil, both literally and figuratively, and just draw simple shapes. You could use circles for the heads, ovals for the bodies, rectangles for the legs, etc. Let your pencil flow. Nothing too sharp or too small.

Doodling might seem silly or useless, but cartoonist and Skillshare instructor Denis Zilber says that it is “really part of the process of making a character.” Doodling helps you come up with ideas, and you might come up with something different from what you had in mind at first. It keeps drawing fun and easy, and it lets you try out different ideas.

Refine Your Shapes

The next step is to start defining the image. Zilber is a professional cartoonist, and in all of his work, he always uses two basic shapes: the C and the S, both in their normal and inverted forms. Using the scribbles you made in step 1, start to define the shape of your character using these two letter shapes.

In this same step, you should start to look at your character’s body. Make sure that their sizes are based on something real, even if that something real is the world they live in. Then, check your character’s skeleton to make sure it fits with how you’ve designed them.

Add Details

This step is where the character design is really set. Start making the shapes bigger than they need to be. Zilber says to make big shapes bigger and small shapes smaller to give the drawing a cartoony feel.

Then choose some design details for your characters that will make your cartoon stand out. Choose props, clothes, poses, and facial expressions that show who they are and what they like. Then, make them even bigger. Zilber says that details like these make the character “more interesting and more appealing.”

Think of Goofy, a member of the Mickey Mouse Club: His feet are huge, his ears hang way down, his hat is strangely small for him, his clothes are loose, and his snout is big. These exaggerations help show off who he is.

Check the Silhouette

Check your character’s outline before you move on to polishing and coloring. If you can figure out who the character might be just by looking at their shadow, you’re on the right track.

Marcks says, “In a lot of ways, you can tell what a person is like by looking at their silhouette.” Some famous cartoon characters, like Mickey Mouse, Ursula, SpongeBob, and Hank Hill, would probably be easy to recognize even as black shadows of themselves.

Polish and Finalize

The last step in how to draw a cartoon character is: Include everything: freckles, crooked teeth, straight teeth, dimples, wrinkled hands, long nails, etc. Anything! Every bit! Make these lines smooth and clean. Choose your colors and add them. Now is the time to make the character really what you want.