Category: Tutorials

Cartoon Sketching: Identifying emotions

My Action Sketching Blog discusses how cartoons (outlines) are used to draw difficult-to-see body motion. This blog, Cartoon Sketching, discusses how to create cartoons for use in comedy and fantasy.

The commonality between all funny and fantastic art is showing character emotion, be those characters realistic, abstract, crude, a life-form, or mechanical. That emotion is shown through a face of some type, usually depicted through the eyes, eyebrows, and mouth.

If you have not yet started cartooning, I recommend you study words that define emotions, such as in the list below:

Emotions and Perceptions: Admiration – Adoration – Aesthetic Appreciation – Amusement – Anxiety – Awe – Awkwardness – Boredom – Calmness – Confusion – Craving – Disgust – Empathetic pain – Entrancement – Envy – Excitement – Fear – Horror – Interest – Joy – Nostalgia – Romance – Sadness – Satisfaction – Sexual desire – Sympathy – Triumph

Next, make a series of simple facial drawings upon which you can test your emotion-depicting skills. Rather than laboring over character development, consider making one simple face, multiply it, then print it out for practice sessions. Here’s an example:

Creating emotions on cartoons - blank faces

Make several copies! Next, take a few copies, draw in eyeballs in every position possible.

Creating emotions on cartoons - blank faces with eyeballs

Analyze what each set of eyeballs tells you about the character in terms of emotion and intent. Label the drawings with your observations, and then duplicate these pages for the next step.

Draw eyebrows on your previously finished pages. Take time to reflect on how much eyebrows changed the meaning of each “face.”

Creating emotions on cartoons - blank faces with eyeballs and eyebrows

Duplicate of your eyeball-only faces and add mouths. Again notice how much you changed meaning.

Creating emotions on cartoons - blank faces with eyeballs, eyebrows, and mouths

Note that each element you randomly add changes the expression.

Depict Specific Emotions:

Next, start from scratch with plain eyeball-less faces and see how many drawings you can make for each emotion listed at the beginning of this article. As you draw, you’ll understand expressive patterns that you can use in your serious art as well as for your comic work.

Keep your drawings simple, but practice as much as possible. Ask friends to respond to your work by telling you what emotions they see in your drawings. The more they “get it,” the more confident you’ll become with your own drawing, observational, and expressive skills!

Creating emotions on cartoons - demonstration of a cartoon soliciting a response

Links:

Author:

This article was written by Karen Little as part of an ongoing series of blogs on Action Sketching. Published on Littleviews.com. January 10, 2020.

Reproduction of this article is free to non-commercial websites (or other media) with permission and attributes to Littleviews.com and the article’s author.

All material on Littleviews (with noted exceptions) is copyrighted on the date of publication.

Questions? Ask Karen Little at karen@littleviews.com.

Please Support Our Mission:

We encourage people to participate in sketching, whether by themselves or in groups, knowing that what they sketch reveals the truth about form and motion.

Shop at our online store, Sketch-Views.com, for originally designed merchandise.

Action Sketching: How to accurately sketch people in motion

The purpose of this tutorial is to teach you how to quickly and accurately draw active people, without resorting to anatomy lessons or guesses. This method relies on reference photos of active people. After selecting a subject, it requires that you draw two sketches of it (a preliminary and final), each on top of a simple, hand-drawn grid.

Photo of man playing tennisUnlike sketching architecture, where the subject, such as a house, is immobile and constructed from a repeatable plan, active people have wildly different physical features and no shared postures.

Although we can imagine how someone kicks a soccer ball or jumps a hurdle, the only way to accurately draw this behavior is by viewing it as a frozen image through a photograph or stop-frame video.

Learning anatomy helps you understand how physical postures might look when in motion, but it does not inform you about specific postures that take place. Consequently, anatomy lessons are not included in this tutorial as they are too general.

Keep in mind, however, that this method is about sketching, not developing illustrations for art galleries. By using it, you’ll produce very satisfying sketches, and hopefully, you’ll be pleased enough with your results to want to further your skills and encourage others to join you.

Materials and Tools

  • Drawing paper (I prefer Canson Mix Media for a more tactile feel under a pencil, but any paper will do)
  • A pencil (I like a BIC mechanical pencil because they are inexpensive, but better ones exist)
  • A straight edge (a ruler or any straight, hard surface  next to which you can draw a line)
  • A photograph of a person in action from any source. Note that if you are producing drawings for sale or publication, you need to obtain permission from the owner or subject to use it if a copyright exists.

Preliminary Image

Example of a preliminary action sketch by Karen LittleYour next step is to create a preliminary image like the one on the right, drawn in under 4 minutes. This is the first of two images you’ll quickly sketch, from the preliminary to the final.

The preliminary image is your exploratory drawing. It is here where you observe your subject and strive to sketch him or her proportionately, without distortion.

The preliminary image helps you organize what you see, with your final composition demonstrating what you learned.

The grid is made up of guidelines that mark the top, bottom, middle and center of the  subject, such as clearly depicted in the diagram below.

Action sketch grid used to help prevent distortions in drawing by Karen Little

Crucial to the diagram is the Center Point, which falls between the high and low point on the perpendicular line between them.  Measurement units, such as inches or centimeters, are not important.

Before starting to sketch, note the location of the center point on your subject. This point will match the grid’s Center Point.  As you go forward, start sketching at the center, not on the top or bottom. Sketch what falls within each quadrant and how those things relate to one another. Do not focus on the image as a whole.

By working in small, highly-focused areas, you will be less likely to introduce position distortion into your overall sketch.

To demonstrate, below is my preliminary sketch superimposed on the diagram.

Demonstration of a preliminary sketch on the action sketch grid by Karen Little

In this example, part of the face, a shoulder, and hip are in the top, left quadrant. The back of the head, a shoulder, and two arms are in the top right. Each leg is in its own quadrant, but such even distribution is not always the case.

Rapid Sketching

Starting at the Center Point, rapidly sketch what you see, going in any direction you please, but focus on what falls within each quadrant, not the whole image. Consider such things as:

  • Shoulder positions
  • Neck placement
  • General head placement, especially observing the relationship of the chin to the shoulders
  • Elbow and knee relationships
  • Hip placement and direction
  • Angle of extremities from their origins
  • Foot and hand angles

Final Sketching

After completing your preliminary sketch, draw the grid for your final work on a second piece of paper.

Again, measurement increments are not important. Use what you learned when doing your preliminary as a guide for developing your final.

In the following example, my preliminary sketch helped me form my final and while constructing my final, I made corrections that I did not initially see and improved upon its overall look.

Even if you do not understand anatomy, the grid forces you to focus on positional relationships, enabling you to sketch the final with more confidence and fewer distortions.

Sketch of many playing tennis to illustrate action sketching by Karen LittleYes, there is more to learn about sketching than what you see here. Even studying anatomy is very helpful. Most important with this technique, however, is that you learn how to quickly and accurately plan and sketch relationships between body parts in action.

Date your final sketches and keep all of them.

Refer back to your sketch library to see your own growth, identify areas you’d like to improve, and/or use poses for future projects.

Photo and Illustration References

The photo used in this article is by Bogdan Glisik as originally posted on Pixel.com.

Illustrations by Karen Little.

Links

Author

This article was written and illustrated by Karen Little as part of an ongoing series of blogs on Action Sketching. Published on Littleviews.com. January 4, 2020.

Reproduction of this article is free for non-commercial websites (or other media) with permission and attributes to Littleviews.com and the article’s author.

All material on Littleviews (with noted exceptions) is copyrighted on the date of publication.

Questions? Ask Karen Little at karen@littleviews.com.

 


 

Action Sketching: Drawing accurate relationships and cartoons

We at Littleviews encourage you to draw action figures because the act of drawing helps you to better understand a subject and it can fill your time with an enjoyable pastime.

Unfortunately, while many people take drawing lessons, they fail to achieve satisfactory skills. The reason for that is that they are taught to draw completely by eye, with no other tools to measure the correct proportions of a subject.

There are many tools that can be used to quickly create correctly proportioned drawings. Here are examples that appear in Google Image Searches:

If you search for “artist tools,” however, you will mainly see paint brushes.

Leonardo da Vinci learned his craft by spending years directly copying the work of his master, Andrea del Verrocchio. Likewise, Leonardo taught his students by using the same method.

Direct copying teaches people how to see a three-dimensional object, such an action figure, as a one-dimensional (flat) object on paper.

Example of freehand sketch using photo reference

Without using the Leonardo method, you can see above how distorted a freehand sketch can be even when based on a reference photo. The player’s left arm is completely wrong as is the left side of his billowing shorts.

If freehand sketching was your only option, you’ll almost never be able to understand distortion unless an instructor points it out.

Today, you don’t need to copy a grand master’s work to learn about proportions and relationships. Simply find and copy easily available photos and other images you see on the web.

Note that even on my finished painting, I improvised areas, rather than slavishly copied. A cartoon does not impose itself on you. Rather, you impose yourself on it.

Cartoons:

An outline sketch, whether proportional or imagined, is called a “cartoon.” Cartoons are guidelines. Cartoons, in fact, were used to sketch out the imagery that was eventually painted on the Sistine Chapel. Yes, the great masters were cartoonists!

While an outline provides a guide, it is how you finish your drawing that makes your work unique. I will discuss finishing techniques in future blogs.

Links:

For copyright-free reference material, visit:

  • Pixel.com for “the best free stock photos & videos shared by talented creators.”
  • Unsplash.com, “the internet’s source of freely usable images.”

There is a lot of information on the web about creating concept art.

An excellent tutorial by Donald Yatomi is “Sketching for Concept Art.” Yatomi shows how he uses a combination of very rough sketches, stacks of reference material, and his imagination to create previously unknown monsters and scenery. Unfortunately, this tutorial is only available through a subscription to Blueprint.com. The subscription is worth it, however, if you want to learn from masters, Yatomi among them.

Author:

This article was written by Karen Little as part of an ongoing series of blogs on Action Sketching. Published on Littleviews.com. December 18, 2019.

Reproduction of this article is free to non-commercial websites (or other media) with permission and attributes to Littleviews.com and the article’s author.

All material on Littleviews (with noted exceptions) is copyrighted on the date of publication.

Questions? Ask Karen Little at karen@littleviews.com.

Please Support Our Mission:

We encourage people to participate in sketching, whether by themselves or in groups, knowing that what they sketch reveals the truth about form and motion.

Shop at our online store, Sketch-Views.com, for originally designed merchandise. The following limited edition mug will be available through January 30, 2020. Enter code TZKVYSCGMEVZ  for a 15% discount.

 

Action Sketching: Tracing a photo of a mannequin

In my last post, I demonstrated how you can get a nice action sketch from a video fragment (see below). There are a number of ways to accomplish this, depending on skill. One of the fastest ways (one used by prolific manga artists) is to model your drawing on a mannequin.

Video Image

Ideally, you can set up your mannequin to copy the pose you see in the video, then take photos of it with your cell phone.

Setting up an action manikin

You might need to take several photo to most closely reproduce the angle of the player. I chose the following pose to trace.

Photo of manikin to trace

Before printing this photo, I replaced the blue in the above picture with white so I didn’t waste printer ink. I also enlarged the image to 8-inches tall.

The next picture shows the photo laying on top of a LED light tablet, as described in a previous blog. Again, note that I lightened the dark blue area before printing to save ink.

Print on a light table

At this point, I place a sheet of printer paper on top of the printout. The light behind the sheets lets the photo on the bottom show through the paper on top. Trace on the top sheet with a pencil.

Tracing an image of a manikin

From there, make adjustments to the initial trace to better match the required pose. Next, repeat the process by placing the adjusted trace on the LED light tablet, covering it with a piece of printer paper. At this point, refine your drawing.

In the photo below, the final image is sitting on top.

final trace

Depending on your paper and need, you can shade your new image, color it in some way, or even make a new tracing using a fine tip marker instead of a pencil.

No matter what, I am sure you can see the potential in this, with your soccer team members creating still pictures of moments in the game or practice session without requiring years of art training.

Bonus! After tracing a few mannequin images, you’ll subconsciously understand human anatomy in motion and will be able to create your own drawings without going through so much preparation. This is especially true when you save your work so you can refer back to it.

Links:

Author:

This article was written by Karen Little as part of an ongoing series of blogs on Action Sketching.

Please Support Our Mission:

We encourage people to participate in sketching, whether by themselves or in groups, knowing that what they sketch reveals the truth about form and motion.

Shop at our online store, Sketch-Views.com, for originally designed merchandise, many topics of which change over time.

Contact:

Reproduction of this article is free to non-commercial websites (or other media) with permission and attributes to Littleviews.com and the article’s author.

All material on Littleviews (with noted exceptions) is copyrighted on the date of publication.

Questions? Ask Karen Little at karen@littleviews.com.