All language subtitles for 092 Cartoon Style Character Drawing.en

In this lecture let's talk about how to draw in the sort of cartoon I guess you could say Pixar style.

So obviously Pixar isn't the person that are the company that created cartoons but they're just a really

good example they have really refined designs and I really like them.

But this is any kind of cover everything all the way from Pixar to kind of that cartoon network Nickelodeon

Look I'm just extremely exaggerated looking characters and that's what this comes down to is this type

of design comes down to characters that are as exaggerated as possible.

So we're trying to push their shapes their proportions all of that as far as we can get them away from

the human form but still resemble a person.

And that's what this style is all about.

So the first thing we're going to talk about we're going to do is we're gonna do an exercise where we

try out different heads drawing the head is really simple and drawing the bodies a little bit more complicated.

That's why we're gonna start off drawing the head and then we'll talk about drawing the body.

But what we're going to do is we basically just want to start drawing heads using simple shapes and

just kind of turning those into forms that look kind of like head shapes.

We don't have to put faces on them or anything yet.

This is just to kind of get across the idea that what we're looking for are some extreme designs.

So for example you would never see them in real life with an actual square head.

But what we could do is we could just kind of sketch out a square like this

right and then off that if we wanted to we could go ahead and add a neck.

So go ahead and just kind of have the neck kind of curving off like this.

So very cartoony

right could even put some ears on there.

Let's say we do some kind of square type of ears like that

and then from there we can go ahead and build our character's head off of that.

But you can see that is just built with some incredibly simple shapes.

Let's go ahead and try another one.

So let's do one where somebody said is let's say kind of like an oval

something like that we'll go ahead and give this character neck we'll kind of have this neck kind of

going more off to the side go and add some ears

and honestly on a lot of these we actually don't even really need to do ears.

It's really up to you but to keep this nice and simple if you want you can just do the heads with the

neck.

You know you have to worry about the actual years.

We just want to give the idea that these are head forms.

Let's go ahead try another one.

What if we tried something like a triangle.

So let's say we kind of did sort of a curved triangle like this

Well that's kind of interesting looking.

What if we wanted to kind of do that from more of the side so let's go ahead and kind of just redraw

the same shape

the same we'll kind of make it look like more of a three quarters view so the neck will kind of be coming

off from this side right here.

And so you can see that when we start off with our character design especially in this cartoon style

we really just want to start with the simplest shapes in the simplest of lines because that's your main

mode of communication when you're designing characters like this.

And really when you're designing any characters but especially these type of characters and so we just

want to basically fill a page up with ideas of different shapes and proportions that we could play around

with.

So what we're going to do is we're gonna go ahead and fill this entire page up with different heads.

I'll go ahead and timelapse it a little bit.

So you want to watch it in real time.

And I want you to do the same thing so you can watch me you can do it along with me or you can watch

it and do it afterwards.

But I want you to fill your own page up with your own head designs as well just using simple shapes.

So let's go ahead and get started.

All right great.

So there we go.

Or just fill the whole page with a bunch of different shapes for heads.

Some of them are angled differently.

I went ahead and I just kind of put a cross or a plus sign through their face just to give you an idea

of the direction that they're looking and about where their eyes would be in the center of their face.

You can see that these are all different shapes and sizes some of them are the same like these ones

right here.

Kind of just add two different variations or two different angles but the whole point of this is is

just really start playing with shapes and getting some ideas out.

And then from here you can go ahead and further your character design.

Now we're gonna go ahead.

We're gonna basically do the same thing but we're gonna go ahead and do it with body poses so we want

to just keep it super simple just like we did before but we want to play with things like proportions

and stuff like that.

So for example we could start off with let's say kind of a shape like this

all right.

And then maybe we could kind of build a head off for that really basic shape for the head and then they

will start drawing in some legs

and we just want to keep this super simple very sketchy

and we want to really capture some sort of a gesture if you need to you can definitely look at reference

for this because even I have to look at reference sometimes especially for stuff like this so make sure

that you look at reference get some ideas look at yourself in the mirror if you need to and try doing

some different poses.

But the main thing we're playing with here is we're playing with shapes and we're playing with proportions

right.

So there's just kind of a fun little character if we could give him some ears if we want but we're just

playing with these shapes and forms.

So we basically gonna do the same thing we just barely did except we're gonna fill this whole page up

with little character drawings.

So I'm gonna go ahead and timelapse this but you'll see that I'll use all kinds of different shapes.

It really just starts out as shapes and then you want to kind of add limbs to it and stuff like that.

So let's go ahead and begin

All right great.

So there we go.

We just fill the whole page with character body concepts and so we just want keep him super simple shapes

you can see that in get detail that and add facial features some of them are really sketchy so like

this one for you here for example.

But they're all pretty sketchy.

They ought to be perfect.

That's just to kind of get the ideas across of what the shapes are and the proportions of that character.

We can work on pose later and stuff like that and apply what we know.

Look at some reference and apply that to our character design but this phase is all about just playing

with the shapes and figuring out kind of the overall look of our character's body.

All right.

So from here what we can do is we can go ahead and we can pick some and we can draw those characters.

So like if I turn my heads back on we can look at this.

We can pick one and we can go out and draw it.

Now when it comes to drawing the facial features and stuff like that there's not really any rules when

it comes to cartoons.

They come in so many different variations and styles and so all of that really kind of comes down to

whatever you want that to look like.

So for example you could put a pair of anime eyes onto a cartoon character and it'd still be cartoon

just because of the body proportions and the head proportions and stuff like that.

As long as you keep things looking very exaggerated and almost deformed it would basically be deformed

then your characters are going to look a lot more cartoonish.

So if that's what you're going for that's what you want to focus on is really deforming these proportions

and stuff like that.

So let's go ahead and maybe we'll draw a few faces so we can just go and here onto these faces a switch

to a black and we could just start drawing some faces some of them might look bad some of them might

look good.

This is really just like an exercise to understand this style of drawing.

So for example let's just go ahead and maybe we'll draw an eyebrow like that and we can keep these faces

really sketchy

all right.

You can see I'm just trying different things after working in some like Photoshop.

You could just create different layers so that you can delete this if you actually end up not liking

it.

And so you can see I'm kind of mixing it up I'm kind of doing sort of Disney esq type eyes

but I'm also doing kind of an animated type nose I'm just a simple line for the mouth so it's really

up to you kind of the nitty gritty is of the style of your cartoon styled animation drawings.

But what again just what you're really looking at to focus on is those extreme exaggerated proportions

and shapes and stuff like that

we can give this character some glasses like that

give him the big nose who knows maybe this character doesn't even have a mouth I don't know why but

I feel like his character should be bold so just kind of him bold

and sometimes it just comes out bad.

Sometimes it's just it's not going to look good and that's all right.

It's all part of the design process like that.

That's just absolutely terrible.

Let's go ahead.

Let's give something else a shot.

So

Verdi has some angles going on so let's really make this character kind of very angled

super pointy nose

and maybe we'll give him a big old grin and a big mustache

will draw his teeth and individually so we can get kind of this nice looking crooked look to his teeth

some like that

years and this is just your first sort of rub.

You can go back and change things up change up proportions and stuff like that until you get your character

looking kind of the way you want them.

But don't worry if this doesn't look exactly how you wanted to look at this point

is just to get some ideas out.

Basically

may we try drawing the same character in kind of a different angle so maybe his nose is like that from

the side

of this character.

We'll give him some nice big cute eyes and just make him really cartoony kind of this raindrop type

of shape like that look with this cartoon look like doing those type eyes I mean

kind of put the IRS is right there in the center I'm giving some eyebrows

maybe this is a baby so I'll give him a

give him a pacifier

when they can empties up her eyelashes

to it we can do it.

This right here.

All right.

So there's just a few examples of taking these heads a little bit further and you can basically do the

same thing for these body poses.

I'm not going to go through all of them cause going to take a long time but the main point that you

need to remember is that it's all about those proportions so it's about making sure that the proportions

are exaggerated extreme that you moving around try different things so like if we come over here to

these bodies you can see that if we look at have a look at the proportions it's kind of talk about and

compare them to a real human.

So for example this body right here may not be the best pose but the body design is pretty ok switch

over.

Let's see.

Here we go.

And so if we look at those you can see that his head is absolutely ginormous compared to his body.

Right.

His head is way bigger than this rectangle that makes up his body it's about two times bigger.

And that would never happen in real life generally.

And so that's really exaggerating those proportions and pushing the body form to the limits which is

what we're trying to achieve with this type of design.

All right here you can see that this head has a pretty exaggerated shape it's just kind of a diamond

with kind of rounded curves to it on the neck comes right off the top of the head which wouldn't really

happen in real life the legs are basically big triangles right which all this could be changed a little

bit.

As you develop your character a little bit more but the proportions are just completely different.

If we have a look at a character like let's say we find a good one.

So this one right here for example the head is right there.

And if you're memory saying even though we don't usually use this as a guide but in this case let's

talk about how this head right here isn't really a heads high for the body.

So a normal human body is going to be seven to eight heads high and you can see here that if we were

to draw this into this bodies only about three and a half heads high.

So those are some extreme proportions right.

So we're really shifting things around and messing around with things.

So maybe from the head down to the crotch is normal or about normal.

But then if you look at the legs the legs are way shorter than they would actually be in real life on

a real human body.

Same for the Arms.

Arms are really short and tiny which just kind of makes the character a little bit more cute or funny

or whatever you're trying to go for this character right here you can see that his head is way tiny

compared to his giant rectangular body right it's massive and then he has a short tiny little legs or

really plain with these proportions and that's what makes our characters look exaggerated and like caricatures

and that really puts them into the category of sort of that cartoon look and then again on top of all

this we can really add whatever kind of style we want if we want we can do the sour let's say we just

kind of draw the nose as a 7 if we want we can kind of draw the nose out more like

a more realistic nose right maybe for drawing it from the side it looks something like this

right.

It's really up to us what the styles of the features are going to look like what the hair cell is gonna

be like.

How simple are is the line quality so for a hand for example we're just going to kind of do something

like this right maybe make that look a little bit better.

Are we going to actually draw our individual fingers very specifically so that they have their joints

and stuff like that right.

That's all up to us we're gonna do anime styled eyes all of that aesthetic sort of detail is gonna be

up to you that won't really break the style of the cartoon look what's going to break it is if you start

drawing body forms and head forms that look more realistic and have more realistic proportions then

it's just going to start to look like a different genre such as anime or the classic animation style

or if it's really realistic and it didn't start looking like comic book style art.

So really what you're looking for is just exaggerate those forms push those forms to their limit try

all kinds of crazy shapes do whatever you can to make the body and the head forms look extreme and then

from there you can make your own choices on what the line quality will be like what the style of the

eyes will be like you can mix and match things you can do whatever you want when it comes to that just

really focus on those body and head forms that brings us to the end of this lecture if you have any

questions about drawing in the cartoon so make sure that you post them to the Q and A section the course

and either me or my teacher assistant will get you an answer them.

Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lecture.