If you are a drawing enthusiast like me you should always be looking for ways to improve your craft. No matter if you are a beginner or a seasoned pro there is always scope for improvement. So you should never stop learning or assume there is nothing more to be learnt.
In this article I am going to share certain tips that will show you how you can improve your drawing skills. It may so happen that some of the tips and techniques that I am going to explain are already known to you. But I believe you will find certain things that are new to you or even if you know about it you do not use it normally. So detailing those tips here would be acting as a refresher to you.
Cartoon drawing really is a fascinating hobby which can become a good and lucrative carrier if properly practiced given the high demand of good cartoon artists these days. And because of these very reasons now- a-days many young stars are getting into cartoon drawing.
But unfortunately out of these beginners only a few continue with the art. Most of the time it is not that the kids are not capable enough. Actually like every other skill, to pick up cartoon drawing skill one has to go through a learning curve. And this journey can be an arduous one if they fail to get proper guidance on their path. Without proper guidance even the simplest of things may appear difficult and impossible to do.
When faced with this apparent difficulty beginners just need some confirmation that these difficulties can be handled and overcome if they just keep at it and practice a bit more.
In this article, the tips given would show you how you can approach cartoon drawing slightly differently to make your work somewhat easier. But bear in your mind no article can do the actual work for you. Even if you read this article, you will have to work and do practice for sufficient amount of time.
But if you follow this article suggestions the task of cartoon drawing should not be appearing an impossible task and there will be little chance that you will feel like dropping off without completing your journey of being an expert cartoonist.
And if you are already a seasoned pro you might discover some hidden gems that you can add to your bag of techniques. Or make some of the techniques you already use more efficient and more effective.
So let us now get started with the real thing:
My first suggestion would be before you start drawing keep in mind that you may have to erase your work to make corrections so draw with as less pressure as possible because then undoing your work will be easy and your drawing would not look dirty. Also never use a very soft grade pencil to make your drawings. Because if you do, you will find undoing your work is difficult when try to make corrections. Always use HB grade pencil to be safe.
Using grid papers can be a good learning aid for the beginners. Grids help because they gives the new comers clues regarding the objects’ and, characters’ relative size and positioning. But you should not be overly dependent on it, as soon as you feel that feeling of size, position & proportion is taking shape within you stop using grid papers for your drawing.
A very important thing you should always bear in mind that drawing is actually a process of converting 3D reality of our the world around into 2D shapes on the drawing paper. So when you are drawing a head using a oval or an elliptical shape think the shape to be actually an air filled balloon, this will make your work of positioning nose and eyes very easy especially if the head is slightly turned towards a particular side.
To be good at drawing no matter what you are interested to draw it may be cartoons or it may be portraits of peoples you have to very efficient user of a pencil. Truly the ability of drawing smooth and well controlled lines is an asset for a drawing artist. Let me tell you a secret, you can easily enhance your skill of pencil handling if practice the simple exercise that I am going to describe here.
Grab a good quality pencil, make sure it is not a very short one, and also ensure your wrist is not touching the paper, now start making circles on the paper. Keep it simple Only make circles on the paper, the circles do not have to be perfect. Just keep on drawing circular shapes over and over again on a single sheet of paper. Do this exercise for 4 to 6 minutes when you find time, soon you will find completing more complex drawings will seem much easier to you.
Whatever things we see all around us in our world can be thought to be comprised of few basic geometric shapes. As an example of this we can think of human body. Without any doubt human body is a quite complex structure but if looked at closely we can imagine human body to be created using two simple shapes. Namely sphere and cylinder. Head can be thought to be a modified sphere and arms, legs, and torso to be made of modified cylinders.
So your task as an artist would be to decompose your surrounding environment in your mind before attempting to recreate them on paper. Or in other terms you need to train your mind to look at things or entities around you in terms of its constituent basic geometric shapes.
Here in this article we covered some core topics on the subject of drawing. If you focus on them when you are getting started, you will certainly be miles ahead of other wannabes. But these tips and suggestions would only work when you will do your work to put them in actual use. As you are a drawing fan I do not see any reason for not using the suggestions given here. Specially because these are simple and will not take any extraordinary commitment in terms of time and money to integrate them in your art life.
About the Author
Do you know most beginners find face drawing to be the most difficult part? Learn simple cartoony face drawing techniques from this tutorial and do not forget to check this popular cartoon drawing course.
