Everyone Can Draw

Everyone Can Draw

I often hear the words “I can’t draw”. This comment in and of itself suggests you are placing a stopper on the possibility of your being able to draw, but more importantly what should be noticed is that all it takes is determination to succeed and with that anyone can draw, don’t limit yourself, I truly believe anyone can draw and when it comes to cartoons drawing “well” is not always “better”. Get the point across and you have succeeded. I have seen squiggle that are much more effective than beautiful curves. The witty single-framed captioned images in newspapers are not masterpieces, but they make you laugh right?

When you think about it, what is drawing? Think of the world in front of you as 2D when you look at it when you are thinking about sketching. Put a series of lines together in a particular way and you have a sketch, a form. Everyone can draw a line, now you just need to understand how to put the puzzle pieces in place in order to achieve what you want. Creating carbon copies of images by freehand taught me the basics of the positioning of lines on paper. It showed me the answers to the puzzles. It’s a good way to learn. I cannot stress enough just how useful this is for teaching yourself how to draw.

As with any medium, there are various types of cartoon, and each cartoonist has their own style. You can usually recognise an individual’s work. There are of course some standard ideas. Here I will give you some basic examples. It should be mentioned that in cartoons proportions and accuracy are an unnecessary annoyance. You don’t have to adhere to those rules if you don’t want to it doesn’t matter. What matters is getting the impression you want across.

FACES

What are eyes? Basically two dots will do for eyes, anything more than that is a bonus. Eyebrows and the muscles underneath the eyes are how you create certain expressions. Frowning, squinting etc etc. Similarly a cartoon doesn’t even need to have a nose, many don’t, it might not even need eyes. You might only draw a smile, or only draw some eyes or a nose. What about the face shape? Are they fat? Thin? What kind of character is it and what do people usually relate to visually in terms of that? A thin-faced thin-lipped person may seem stern and serious. What are you aiming for? Think about how people generalise, and use this to make the impression you want that goes for all areas of drawing, not just the face.

Some Basic Examples:

Examples in Use:

MEN and WOMEN

The difference between drawing a man and a woman can be nothing or everything. In anime for example, androgyny is often key. However for the most part people differentiate between the genders in the following simple way: Men have firm sharp bodies, definition is defined by muscle. Women have soft curved bodies, definition is defined by curvature. Here’s a basic demonstration:

HANDS and FEET

Hands and feet are often the bane of people’s lives when trying to draw. They are just so fiddle. However, as I mentioned, this need not be the case. In essence you can completely ignore the complexity of such things in cartoons. In the following examples you can see some different positioning of the feet. In addition to this you can also see a variety of ways of drawing hands, here I am trying to show you that you can have elaborate hands like the large ones, but that in fact you don’t need to, there are lots of easier ways to go about it which work just as well. At the end of the day unless the hands or/and the feet are performing a particular function in the picture, one which really matters to the over-all impression you want to give, they are of little consequence.

DETAIL and INTEREST

When you want to make something more interesting, it’s all about the detail. A single line can make all the difference. It can also be about just how much imagination you have – for example when you want to create hybrids or monsters. If it makes someone go “what the hell is that!” or “that’s really weird…” it means you succeeded. Keep in mind also with monsters and hybrids that real life positioning does not apply as it usually does, because this is something that doesn’t exist. What you should bear in mind is weight distribution and gravity, if you make something with a humongous head that juts out in front of it you need to think about how it is that the creature isn’t falling over onto it’s head all the time, can you balance it out with a massive tail? Is there a piece of cartilage running from its tail bone up to the back of its head? Is there a magic fairy holding its head up?

Monster and Hybrid:

Detail:
(These images are chapter headers, ergo the title in one of them)

Specific Examples

Next I will show you some specific examples with the details of the thought behind the images from sketches I have done for Comments on Self Pages.

Imagery

By putting this guy in a straight jacket I have portrayed the idea of mental instability. The buckles and straps are added detail that make the character more interesting to look at, they also represent being ‘tied up’ as you would be if you were in a mental asylum. By placing him in a mask I have added interest and concern – who is he really? Why is he in a mask? The mask itself could have been any shape or size – but you can see I have given it two pointed sections like horns, this is due to the chaotic nature of the character concerned – horns bring up old ideas about the horned man and of course the devil. The buttons on the collar and the lines down the arms add movement to the image, and if you look at the collar you can see I have placed a shadow where the line of the back of the collar would be. Knees and elbows I usually define with a rectangular shape jutting out from the muscle. A question you might ask is how to draw the straps. Basically a buckle consists of a small rectangle or square, with a larger one around it, the strap width to go with it should be the same width as the smaller rectangle or square. Something else of note – have a look at the dagger on his left boot (Right side as you look at the sketch). Notice how the handle over-laps other sections of the picture. Try to think about what would be in front of what when drawing. I usually draw it all out and then rub out whatever should be behind something else instead of trying to plan it all out from the start, this makes things much easier – make sure you have a good rubber and that you use a soft pencil (say 4B) if you want to try this though!

Motion

Here I have an image that actually involves movement and detailed positioning. The position of the man is quite complicated due to the fact that he is twisting his body. Defining the back I have used spinal nodes along with his shoulder blades. You can use these two features to show the positioning of the back, this is especially true of the spine seeing as it is the core of the back. Notice how the node line curves in the middle. To demonstrate the twisting you can see the side of his abs, and also you can see the curvature of the rib cage. I have drawn the hair flicking forwards to add movement to the image, imagine if I had left it falling limply to the ground, it would be far less interesting. You can see some extra lines on the image which denotes movement, these should be used sparsely and only to represent specific movements such as jumping, spinning, flipping etc, too much and you completely lose the effect. I could have drawn the puppet with all limbs in a forwards direction as he is being driven backwards by the kick – why didn’t I? Because it wouldn’t be as interesting, and because as he is a puppet I can get away with moving his limbs in ways that a person’s would not naturally move in. Look at the leg pointing to the left – it is totally twisted inwards. A puppet would naturally be limp and its limbs would fly all over the place. I have curved the puppet into the kick it is receiving as this is what would naturally happen to a body receiving force into the stomach. For images like this it is worth having a look at martial arts videos and images. Another important thing to note is once again the balancing of forces. The man is putting all of his weight onto that one arm, so that arm is the core of gravity to the movement, it needs to be a completely stable part of the image – as such it is almost completely straight, if I lean that arm too far one way or the other I end up making the character’s movement inherently unstable.

Shadowing

I’m putting this one here to show you the importance of detail. Without the shadowing on the cloak and the definition on the muscles this image would look static. Let’s have a look at the cloak. Firstly notice how one side is turned in, and one is turned out. Turning the cloak in on one side allows you to show its movement in the wind and also lets you define shape on it. The edge is not straight, it has various curvatures. If however I wanted to focus heavily on the character inside the cloak, to focus more on his mood than on his image, I would have used much less definition here and perhaps left both sides turned outwards with straight edges.

Various Points

Finally I will now show you a few images to make some basic points about various aspects of sketching cartoons.

Dis-jointed points of interest

I drew this a long time ago. It is in fact a copy of an image from a marvel comic book. Which one I cannot recall, but why I am showing it to you is for the teeth and for the necklace. Notice that the necklace is not actually joined. Each section floats in mid-air by itself – yet because the piece flows in and of itself and it uses a repeat of the same symbols this does not matter, you still see it as one necklace rather than a group of floating objects. The lines of the teeth have lots of breaks in them in various areas and also show thick gum / shadow lines here and there. Because of the length of the teeth this is both necessary and effective. Breaking the lines means that all your attention is not drawn to a part of the image that in relation to the rest of it is ridiculously over-sized. Adding the thick gum sections / shadows stops the teeth from looking tediously lengthy and instead makes them a point of interest.

Imperfection has its uses

Notice in this image the back of the toilet is completely off-balance and displaced. Does it matter? No. Why? Because firstly the impression I wanted to get across remains in the emotion displayed by the character there-in. In fact, the strange toilet adds to the disjointed nature of the image. You can tell something isn’t quite right here, so the back of the toilet not being quite right seems to fit anyway – unlike with figurative art, in cartoons you don’t have to be specific, often it’s better not to be.

Un-natural can be far more interesting

Finally here is a doodle I did. I’m showing you this to demonstrate how making things look un-natural can often be a good thing. The creature’s leg is certainly not natural. Its lower leg is incredibly thin. The front of its foot is excessively elongated. Its arms look ridiculous. Yet it has a charm all of its own. Don’t be afraid to play with dimensions, often it leads you to create something really special.

Now go get sketching!

What I love about drawing cartoons is that there are no rules. On a personal level, my best work doesn’t come from a set idea, often I start with one and then the page tells me what to draw. This may sound odd, but I might begin with a line, and suddenly see patterns in the page that shift me to create a particular image. I begin drawing a particular body movement and all of a sudden I am moved to alter it in line with what the page is telling me. In this way, I believe that drawing is in fact almost an intuition, it comes from somewhere un-touchable and even if you do not think you can do it, the odds are you can. Everyone doodles when they are on the telephone, this isn’t just chance, you don’t have to doodle…what strange force is it that compels you to take up the pen and start scribbling when you “can’t draw”? Boredom? Absent-mindedness? Or is it something else? Those little doodles you create, no matter how insignificant you may consider them to be, exist now, you created them, and they are in effect…..a sketch - a cartoon.