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Drawing Cartoon Figures
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Body types and poses are vital to defining a character...
...and expressing emotion (look how much you can say without words!)
Every body - from a bird to a dog to a human - has a skeleton. But for cartoons, you don't need to know every bone, just the essential structure (because cartooning is all about the essentials). There are many ways to draw the basic structure - you can use cones and balls, stick-figure joints, or loose scribbles (also called "gesture drawings").
Figure drawing exercise:
Draw a figure over the skeleton provided - you can either make up your own, or use the samples on the left:
Animators and comic book artists follow the same process when designing their characters bodies, as we did when we designed faces in an earlier lesson.
Start by drawing your figure from the front, then extend lines out from key features, and create a 3/4, profile, and rear view lining up your drawings with those reference points.
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