Saturday, September 17, 2011

Learning Cartooning

Went to a class on cartooning a couple of weeks ago.  I was never interested in drawing cartoons or comics and certainly didn't think I could do it.  But the instructor made it easy.  Back to basics--circles, squares, triangles.  The results are below.

My first cartoon character.  The notes on the side are the progression showing how our instructor had us create the drawings.   First we did a light pencil outline of a circle with a square/rectangle on the bottom of it and a triangle where the nose finally went in.  We then drew in vertical and horizontal lines to guide where eyes, nose, and ears would be drawn in.  Once the outline drawing was done, we went over the features with a heavy marker and erased the pencil lines.  He then had us put in a bubble for a comment from the character and a frame around the face which would represent one segment of a comic strip.  It was easy and painless.  Like I said--just back to basics.
Next he had us draw a real comic strip character from the past.  The Yellow Kid was the first real comic character and was created in 1895.
He then wanted us to do an actual comic strip with a character we created.  I passed on this since I don't plan on doing further cartooning and the comic strip idea didn't interest me at all.  Finally,  he wanted us to create a cartoon of him, the instructor from his guidelines.  I just couldn't do this and he was much better looking than the cartoon that he created for an example.  So mine turned out to be a blend of cartoon and life drawing features as shown below.

The caption I gave it reads, "I'm Alfonso, cartoonist extraordinaire."
  

2 comments:

Alex said...

This looks so much fun. =) I think my art started from copying comic strips from newspapers and I realized that it's fun just to draw the outline of everything you see. Of course, that's when I was around 4 or 5. But I still draw cartoon versions of everything when I do draw without reference.
Awesome post!

Unknown said...

I like to play with cartooning occasionally, but like you said, it will never be what I focus on because it just isn't 'me'. It is fun to play with sometimes when I feel a little less serious. It sounds like it would have been interesting to take the class. Great job!