Tips for Drawing Yourself As a Cartoon Character: What could be more fun than making fun of yourself by drawing a cartoon? You could pay a professional to do it, but with a little practice, you could come up with a version on your own. Here are some tips for drawing yourself as a cartoon character.
The best way to start is with a photo. You might feel self-conscious looking at yourself for so long at first, but eventually, you will get used to it. That’s perfect. You need to be able to see yourself from an outsider’s perspective.
Pretend you’ve never seen your face before. Now look at it and find out what your most noticeable feature might be. Perhaps you have squinty eyes or a huge dimple in your chin. You might have an unusual nose or very memorable hair. Or maybe just the shape of your face is noticeable.
Most people have at least one thing that is prominent about their faces. Some people have several obvious features. Those people are a cartoonist’s dream! They are easy to draw a likeness of, and easily recognized as a cartoon.
Take that feature and exaggerate it. If you have big teeth, make your smile take up half of your face. If your hair looks a little wild, make it look even wilder.
Start with either that feature or with the general shape of your face. Draw them with a pencil. Then lightly sketch in the other features. Pay attention to proportion. Try to see all your facial features as shapes. Your eyes might be crescent moons, your nose might be a larger circle in the middle and two smaller half circles on either side.
To get the proportions correct, see how far down on your face your nose is. Is it halfway down? One third? And then how big, compared to another shape, such as your whole face. Is your nose one fourth the size of your face, or half as tall?
Don’t worry about the finest details. Use the outlines or most prominent lines of a feature, and draw those in. Unlike a realistic drawing, when you do a cartoon or caricature, it’s all about sparsity. You need to use fewer lines but still represent the whole.
Yes, this takes a lot of practice. If you are having trouble but can’t tell what’s wrong, show your work to someone and ask them to look and see if they can tell what shape is wrong, or if something is too big or too small or in the wrong place. Often another person can immediately spot what needs to be changed.
Drawing faces that look like the person they represent is one of the absolute hardest things to draw. But don’t let that scare you. Keep practicing, and you will get better.
After you have the lines the way you want them, go over them with a pen. Make sure the pen ink is dry, then erase your pencil lines. You will be left with your caricature. Use these tips to draw yourself as a cartoon character, keep practicing, stay positive, and I guarantee you will make progress. Have fun!
Tips for Drawing Yourself As a Cartoon Character
