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I’m moving along with celebrity caricatures. I’m gonna do a drawing of John Cena now. And unlike the other caricatures I’ve done I’ve actually had to draw caricatures of John Cena from my work from time to time. So, I’m little more familiar with him.

First thing that I notice when I’m looking at him is the squareness of his face. He’s got a much more rugged, sort of chiseled face than most ordinary human beings. So, his jaw is very squared off. His forehead is very squarish. His cheekbones are very squarish. That shape is very prominent on him. It’s probably on a lot of wrestlers. The ridge of Triple H’s brow comes out about a foot.

With the caricature, you are trying to make somebody look even more like them than they themselves look. I’m not so much trying to draw the exact contours as of what I’m seeing as I am drawing my own reactions to the features of his face.

And I’m just roughing everything out right now in blue pencil. Cause I can make all the mistakes I want in blue pencil and then draw over it in black pencil and fix a lot of things.

I’m gonna redraw the whole thing in black and I’ll ignore a lot of the construction lines that I laid down initially. But, the point of drawing those even though they’re not going to be there in the final drawing is that the sort of structural drawing helps me understand the overall shape of his face. As I drawing his face, I’m not just looking at the lines of his face as I see them. I’m thinking of his face as a three dimensional object.

If you ever look at the anatomy of the actual cartilage of the nose, you’ll see that this very tip is actually a separate piece. Study the shape of it and it gives you a big key to the structure of the person’s face and making your caricature look like them.

Again when I’m drawing the size of his face, I’m thinking about all of the different pieces of his skull that make the shape of his face. I’m really emphasizing the underline structure that I’m observing. I’m really just roughing the hair in with the side of my pencil, so I don’t get caught up in drawing every single hair of his crew cut. I sort of emphasize this brow bridge over his eye a little more.

A lot of the shadowing that I’m drawing right now is not actually in the photo. It’s more of me describing my impression of the underline structure of his face.

So, the next step would be to trace this on a light box on another piece of paper or maybe I’ll throw a piece of tracing paper over it and draw it again with a much cleaner line. But, at the same time I’d still be looking at the picture and thinking about the things I want to change a little bit or massage a little bit. But, this gives you a good start of a caricature of John Cena.

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So, what I’m drawing now is just a basic circle and this is about as two dimensional as it
gets. So, it’s kind of good when you’re drawing shadows to imagine where the light is
coming from, because that is going to determine where the shadows fall.

So, let’s just imagine we have a little, we have a ball sitting on the table here, and there’s a
lamp somewhere up here. This is gonna be our lamp. Shining light on this ball, I like to, sort
of, rough things out with the side of my pencil. But I’m just gonna really, roughly sketch an
indication where the shadows might be, and already this is looking a little more three
dimensional. I, sort of, try to make the lines wrap around the object because not only does
that show us where the light shadow is, it also helps sell the idea of the roundness of the
object.

There’s not only going to be a light on the ball, but the ball is going to create a shadow on
what ever surface it’s sitting on, so, we can also draw something under it that gives the
impression of that. So, the more I sort of continue this, the more three dimensional that
ball is gonna start to look. And I can even continue these shadows around. I can just keep
adding finer and finer lines that help give a feeling of roundness to this shape. And this is
very crude, but, hopefully, it gives you an idea of how to create a sense of three
dimensionality.

And this can be applied to just about anything else. And now, we’ll try a different shape. Say
we’re gonna draw a cube, as opposed to a sphere. Just gonna start out drawing the basic
lines, and let’s put our lamp where it was last time. This site here, would be farthest away
from the light, so I’m gong to darken that. But unlike the sphere, I’m gonna try to make my
shadows a lot more evenly covering, these, the shapes. Because it’s got flat shapes, so the,
the shadows are gonna be pretty even across each side. They’re not gonna radiate the way
they would on a, on a round surface.

A shadow is one of the most important tools that you have to make your object or character
appear three dimensional . And sometimes when I’m drawing characters, I’ll put shadows in
that might not even be there, or I’ll put shading lines in that aren’t necessarily there on the
model I’m working from, because it helps sell the idea of dimensionality. And you want to use
every tool that you can to make your characters look real in three dimensional.

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So I’m going to draw a cartoon robot. And I think I’ll make him kind of an old-fashioned looking retro-future robot. And just to make it a little more fun, I’ll give him some personality. Let’s try a sad robot. As I’m starting, I’m really just thinking of my ideas as I’m starting to sketch. I’m not even really sure what I’m going to draw yet. Right now I’m just drawing a basic body shape. I think I want to make him sort of slumped over, kind of a square looking face, I think. I might totally change this in a minute, but right now I’m just sort of trying to come up with my basic ideas. I think I’m gong sort of figure out the characteristics first and then try to figure out how to make it look mechanical later.

In addition to his eyelids, I want to give him some eyebrows that emphasize the character. Or maybe I’ll make these little mechanical things on stalks that can stand in for eyebrows. Now that I’ve got the basic personality I’m just going to refine the details a little bit. So when I started to create this character, the first thing I thought about was who he is and what his emotion is. And once I decided I wanted him to be sad, that suggested to my mind a lot of different shapes. And also he’s not just a flat sketch that I created on paper, but as I was creating him I was thinking about the character in three dimensions. And so in my mind this is now a three-dimensional model that I can use over and over, and I can draw him doing different things, and he’ll always look like the same character because I know how I constructed him.

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So if you’re watching these videos you’ll probably notice that I tend to sketch in really rough lines, and I don’t worry about the final details. I don’t worry about making the drawing look correct. I just start to sort of play with ideas with really, really rough strokes.

One way that I do that is I like to work a lot in a light blue pencil, and just start to sketch that way. That’s what’s called under drawing and it basically means the drawing that you do before the drawing, and there’s a lot of different ways to go about that. You can do like I’m doing an sketch in a light colored pencil and then draw over it in black line to make it more sort of finished.

Another way, what comic book artists always do is one guy will draw in pencil and another guy comes a long and draws in ink, then the pencil lines get completely erased, but the pencil line were necessary because artist wouldn’t be able to just start drawing in ink and have something that looked right.

Another way you can do it is you can just do your rough sketching on one piece of paper and then throw it on a light box and do a tighter drawing on another piece of paper, or just use a piece of tracing paper on top. You can use that technique and do 10 or 12 different versions of something and keep refining it, and keep refining it, and keep refining your ideas as you go.

So what I would do if I wanted to get rid of these blue lines quickly. If you bring in a good Photo Shop and use a huge saturation command and go to the blue channel and the sign channel and turn the lightness all the way up on those two channels and that will eradicate all these blue lines and you’ll end up with a very clean looking black line drawing.

One thing you can do is make small quick sketches that sort of help you get the idea down, and help you get the idea down, and help you get the composition down, and then you can blow them up on a Xerox machine, and I could blow it up like yea big, start drawing it much tighter over the top of it. Put that on a light box and start drawing tighter of the top of that.

So the most important thing is just start with a rough sketch and then move from you rough idea into the final product, and it can look very intimidating to look at a beautiful finished illustration, but you have to know that that person didn’t start out drawing a finished beautiful illustration. I started out drawing a pretty rough looking sketch that didn’t look much like anything, and just started drawing a lot of blobby shapes that sort of gradually refined themselves into a finished drawing. Don’t be afraid to just play and just get your ideas down and then worry about making it look perfect later.

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Sketching is the main way that artists sort of build their drawing muscles and it’s a good idea to just sketch constantly and to just sketch everything around you. You don’t need to wait until you’re sitting in a figure drawing class with a model sitting there holding up a bowl of fruit to be able to warm those drawing muscles. Basically, anywhere you are, you can always have a sketch book and if you have a few minutes, you’re sitting on a train or a bus or something like that. Every artist I know has a sketch book full of subway drawings, or whatever. Hopefully, without them getting mad at you, you could just sit their and sort of capture a quick impression of how they’re sitting. Maybe, the details of what they’re wearing.

Really, there’s no how-to about it because what you’re really doing is trying to perceive things and translate your own perceptions into drawings. The only how-to about it is to just do it as much as you possibly can. You need to be an extremely confident draftsman. You need to have the ability to draw just about anything without much effort and without having to do a lot of work. And the only way that you build that ability is by just drawing all the time. So, this isn’t about doing a final finished drawing. This is just about getting an idea down as quickly as you can. Just about developing the muscles that transmit an idea from your eyes to your brain and to your pencil and just getting it down fast, loose, and spontaneously and moving on to the next thing.

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A lot of cartoon characters are constructed on very, very simple shapes, because that’s how animators can keep them consistent from scene to scene. His whole body might essentially be constructed of two simple ovals, because when you’re drawing animation, the first thing you have to do is draw those two ovals and as long as you keep the size of those ovals consistent, then your character is likely going to come out looking pretty much the same.

So I’m going to make an oval for the head and I’ll draw a center line that shows exactly where the center of his face is going to be. And then, to attach the trunk, I might draw a circle that’s perfectly centered on that oval. I know to attach the trunk right there.

As long as I really work out this construction, I’m going to be able to draw this same elephant character doing just about anything, and he’s still going to look like the same elephant.

Again, I’m going to make the legs out of simple cylinders. I’ll draw little circles that show where they attach.
You know what? That’s a little boring. Let’s get a little more personality into those legs. I’m going to make the legs a little bit narrower where they attach to his body, because that’ll add a little more personality to them.

And looking at it now, I think I want his head to be bigger. I’ll give him these fun little goofy eyes.
I’m just thinking of where his tusks meet his head is built on because as long as I know exactly where those tusks attach I’m going to be able to draw them from any angle.

So, now that I’ve done all that construction work and made all these messy lines, I can go in with a black pencil and just refine it to some very simple lines. Now that I’ve created my little cartoon elephant here, I can use him in a myriad of other poses.

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So now we’re going to talk about secrets of drawing cartoon characters. And in another video I created this quick cartoon elephant, but I didn’t just draw him straight out, I constructed him from simple shapes in three dimensional space. So now I’ve got this character, who for me, exists in this kind of three dimensional head space. So now I can put him in a bunch of different poses and I can make him do stuff and he’ll always come out looking like, kind of, the same character.

So let’s get him up on his feet and make him do something completely ridiculous and have him dance. It’s very important in animation to start with really simple shapes because you’re going to have to draw these characters over and over many, many times. And you want to start with simple shapes that are easy to remember and keep consistent.

I’m going to start by drawing an oval shape for his head and let’s get a lot of. We see in the center line that helps me determine where his face his going to be. And let’s get a lot of, energy into this pose. So I’m going to, before I even draw the oval for his body I’m actually going to push him a little out of shape. And I’m going to sort of arch his back and try to get a lot of action into this pose. So even though I constructed his body out of an oval I don’t need to keep it a perfectly oval shape. I can, sort of, bend it out of shape and make it into a kind of bean.

When I was creating his arms and legs the first thing I figured out was where they would attach to that oval shape that makes his body. The first thing I want to do is I’m going to actually draw the places where his arms and legs attach. I want to raise one leg up so I’m going to make that higher and I’m going to make the other leg lower and I’m going to make the leg he’s standing on.

He’s a big heavy elephant and he’s putting all his weight on one leg and I really want to give you a sense that he’s pushing down on that leg. So I am actually going to squash that leg down a bit. Let’s kick that leg up a little higher, actually. And again while I am drawing this I am keeping my eye on my original model because I want to make sure I get the arms about the right thickness so he still looks like the same character.

There’s a circle in the front of his head that creates the point where the trunk attaches so I am going to draw that same circle again. To make room for a mouth I want to push those tusks up a little higher. Now I’m going to add the eyes and I’m going to look at where the eyes, where do the eyes in relation to the trunk, how far away they are from that circle where his trunk attaches, and also how much distance there is between his two eyes.

Animation artists are constantly doing this sort of thing where we’re creating construction lines between the different features of a persons face so that we can make sure that all this stuff stays consistent. I want to really make his ears gone wild because that will help create the feeling that he’s moving. And now I’m just going to tighten that up with some black pencil. And there he is, now he’s dancing. And that should give you a very quick, crash course in secrets of drawing cartoon characters.

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Hi. My name’s Kevin Kobasic. I’m a full time illustrator, cartoonist and story board artist. My primary business is story boarding for ad agencies, but I also do character design for animation studios. I’ve drawn comics for Marvel. I do a lot of illustrations for WWE and various other clients. I’ve been drawing my whole life. I’ve been drawing professionally for about 20 years. I didn’t have any formal education. I learned pretty much everything I do on-site or on the job. There’s plenty of art training out there that you can get, but the most important thing above all is not how you go about trying to break into a career as an artist, or where you go to school. The most important thing, is that you draw constantly and that you become a very confident, proficient draftsman, and that you train yourself to be able to draw anything fast and well. So I’m gonna try to impart some tricks of the trade that I’ve picked up that may seem very simple or may even seem obvious in hindsight, but that a lot of people don’t use. And they, hopefully, will help you take your drawings to the next level.

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So, a lot of people want to know how to go about becoming a professional artist. And the one thing that I’ve learned overall is that there’s not necessarily a clear career path to doing it. And the most important thing is to draw and draw and draw constantly and get really good. And no matter what field of the arts that you’re hoping to get into, making yourself really good is really the number one. And hopefully, everything else kind of flows from that.

My time in the comic book business, I was a professional artist and I was also an editor, so I was the person hiring artists. One of the most important things that you can do as an aspiring professional is learn to listen to criticism of your own work. No matter what field you hope to get into, you know, even if what you want to do is design robots for video games, still, draw from life, draw everything you see around you. Fill up a sketchbook, start a blog and just do whatever it takes to develop that discipline of constantly learning, constantly developing, constantly seek out professional advice and listen to it.

And keep your mouth shut while that professional is talking and follow their advice and keep an open mind and know that they’re critiquing your work and they’re not personally attacking you. And that your work can always get better and it will always get better the more you develop an ability to view it dispassionately and listen to other people’s input.

Whatever field you want to get into, it’s good to just be in that field in whatever capacity you can, even if it’s just an entry-level job doing something meaningless. As I said, I got into the comic book industry as an intern. Later on, I got into the advertising industry by temping. And when I had downtime from my temp duties, I would be sitting there doodling. And eventually, somebody started noticing. And one day, the storyboard artist didn’t show up and they were desperate and they needed somebody and they let me have a chance. And that was my first job as a storyboard artist and I’ve been doing it for ten years.

It’s hard to say the nuts and bolts of how to get into different fields, particularly because things are changing all the time. But the best thing is to just be around the industry you want to get into as much as possible. Get to know as many people as you can. Get to learn everything about the industry you possibly can. Impress people with your good attitude and your good work ethic. And just constantly be learning and constantly be improving your abilities. And hopefully, somebody will take notice and it will lead somewhere.

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So I just finished drawing a skull, and now I’m going to show you how that shape related to drawing a face. Again, I’m going to start out drawing sort of a loaf of bread shape, and that gives me the top of my head. And the bottom of my loaf of bread is about where the cheekbones are going to fall. And then I’m going to add this wedge shape on the bottom that describes the jaw. Now I’m going to add a center line that is going to show me where the eyes are. So when I’m looking at a person’s face, the first thing I look at is the construction of their skull. One thing that really differentiates different people’s faces is this space between the eye sockets. You’ll find if you really look at this negative space that isn’t actually anything between the eyes, that will really help you understand the structure of different people’s faces.

So even though I’m drawing an actual face, I really start out drawing a skull. And then I think of the mouth, I tend to think of it as sort of a single mass, almost like a Darth Vader kind of thing right there. I’m just going to rough in where the eyes are going to go. The eyelids sort of wrap around the eyeball. So that pretty much gives me all the construction I need to start actually drawing a face. Again, even though I’m just drawing a person’s face, I’m really, when I’m drawing this line I’m really thinking of all the landmarks on the skull. I’m really just kind of wrapping it around these, the cheekbones and into the ridge that goes around the eye socket. If you really, really can learn to draw a skull, then you can really have a leg up on learning to draw faces.

I don’t actually know if I’m drawing a man or a woman here. I guess I better, based on the nose I’m going to guess it’s a man. Everybody sort of has these lines. They’re very prominent on some people. They’re very subtle on other people, but everybody has this sort of shape. And once you really master that, it really helps you make your faces look three-dimensional and realistic. Now the very last thing I’m going to do is draw the eyes themselves. The eyebrows tend to somewhat follow the upper edge of the eye socket. Let’s do sort of a neutral expression. It’s important that you start at the beginning of the process, and that you work your way toward the final product.

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So now we’re going to talk about how to show movement in drawings. Particularly for drawing comic book characters. Comic books really thrive on a sense of movement and a sense of dynamics. You’re drawing static lines on a two dimensional plane. The two things that don’t exist that you want to give the illusion of is roundness, three-dimensionality, and motion. Two things that do not exist on your paper, but you want to make it look like they exist.

So let’s imagine we’re drawing a character throwing a punch. Obviously that’s never going to fly. That doesn’t look like a punch at all. It just looks like a guy standing there. So you have to really be thinking about, not only what the arm is doing, you have to be thinking about what the entire body is doing. You really have to sort of imagine you’re the character and really imagine how the whole body gets into that action.

The first thing I think of is just to really get a sense of the motion rather than trying to draw a finished character. I really imagine that the character is leaning into it. Throwing his weight on his forward foot.

I imagine his other arm is going to go back. Sort of like that.

You need to learn the structure of the body, but the more you draw that stuff comes second nature to you and you can just focus on the action. You can see what I really started with is just some very simple kind of flowing lines. A lot of times when I’m drawing a figure, I really think of the central flow of the action rather than thinking of the character as a collection of torso and arms and legs and head. I really think of each action as just a single line even. When I really started thinking about this pose, I really thought of a single line from this fist, straight through the arm, through the body, and down to the back foot. And that’s really what’s helping me create this pose.

Now I’m just throwing in the muscles where I know they are. That’s a whole other can of worms.

Even the parts of the body that don’t really change shape like the skull and the shape of the head itself, I’m still going to emphasize those lines that will sort of help me sell the feeling of that motion. Even though what the background is doing isn’t part of the actual motion, it still should all just feel like it’s part of the same flow.

You always want to be thinking about where the character’s weight is. What foot are they putting their weight on? There’s kind of a sense of muscular tension because that leg is doing the job of holding the whole figure up.

So if you look at these two side by side you can really see the obvious differences. Not only is this character’s body much more activated, but every part of the body is really helping to sell that idea that he’s moving forward relentlessly and the character’s in motion. Even though it’s a still frame, it still feels like a piece of animation. You get a sense of movement. You get a sense of action from it.

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What I always do is start out with a simple shape. In this case I’m going to draw a mouth from the front. Let’s imagine our character is smiling so I’m going add sort of a curve line that indicates where that smile is going to go and then this oval describes the shape of the lips. I think of the top lip as sort of two triangles with a little indentation in the top. I think of the bottom lip, I tend to, again, just map out a sort of a little square shape to describe the bottom lip and then bring up the sides like that. The bottom lip tends to be a little bit thicker than the top lip.

And again, now that I’ve got those basic shapes, I’m just going to land the actual lines. One thing that really helps the mouth look realistic is when you get this little shape, I don’t know why, but top lips always do this funny little thing in the middle. If you look at a mouth really closely, there’s always kind of a little edge to the bottom. Again, now I’m just adding my shading lines, they sort of, they describe the light hitting the mouth but they also describe the actual shape of it.

So now we can do the same mouth with a more neutral expression. When the mouth smiles, the lips sort of tend to get a little thinner so if I drew this exact same mouth in a more neutral expression the lips would appear a tiny bit fuller. When this mouth is smiling, it stretches the mouth sideways and that makes the mouth a little thinner in the center and it makes the sides pull a little straighter.

So lets imagine this character with the mouth open. Again, I tend to think of everything as squares when I’m blocking things out. So if I look at a person smiling I tend to see their teeth as a literally just as a white box and that helps me sort of figure out the construction of their mouth. And again, when the character is smiling it’s going to stretch those lips out so this little bump in the center of the top lip is going to flatten out when they smile.

It’s good when you can, when you’re dealing with something like teeth for instance, where it’s a lot of little complicated shapes, if you can just think of the teeth as sort of a single white square shape. That really helps you to get into it. Then you can add a few little details around the edges to make it look more like real teeth and just a little indication of gums. You’ll find if you try to draw every little tooth, it kind of makes the person look kind of ghoulish. So I tend to do just a few nicks around the edges that give me the appearance of teeth.

Now I will show you more of a side view and how to construct that. You always want to remember that the top lip goes a little forward of the bottom lip so it’s sort of a triangle on its side. That’ll be the mouth. And that top lip, the little bumpy part in the middle is just going to overlap that bottom lip kind of like that. The bottom lip again, is a little bit fuller, it’s a little bit more circular in shape. The top lip looks a little more triangular from the front, from the side I mean. The best thing to do is just draw constantly, and just draw everything you see and you will build up a bank in your memory of images that you know you how to draw without having to constantly reference everything.

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So I’m looking at a picture of Brad Pitt right now that I pulled off the internet. So the first thing that strikes me is how square shaped his head is. He’s got those rugged action movie good looks, action star good looks. So that’s whats jumping out at me is the overall squareness of his head. The second thing that’s jumping out at me is the size of his forehead. He’s got a very sizeable forehead so I’m going to sort of block that out.

Charachaturing is a lot about just sort of noticing your own reactions to peoples faces and sort of capitalizing on them. Another thing I tend to look at quickly is sort of the bridge of somebodies nose. I notice he’s got a very wide bridge. I notice just a lot of horizontal lines in his eye region so I’m going to really kind of emphasize the horizontals. His nose has a very strong profile but it’s actually kind of a short nose. It sort of terminates kind of high on his face.

Rather then actually drawing his mouth the first thing I’m going to do is sort of block out this shape that sort of represents his teeth in my mind. And then I notice hes got very prominent cheek bones. The lines of a mans face tends to be a lot more angular then a woman’s face. Even though I’m drawing this in parts, I’m not thinking of it in parts.

So I’ve got my initial impressions down. I’m going start tiding that up that up in black line. I do all my under drawing in light blue and use it as a structure. Slightly indicate all the folds around his eyes because if you go too overboard with that it starts to make him look very old. Really with hair you want to look at all the individual hairs, but overall you want to think of hair as kind of a mass rather than trying to draw individual hairs.

The next step is to take it to a light box or throw a piece of tracing paper over it and start doing a tighter drawing and at the same time I’m going to be noticing different things that I want to change about it or that I want to emphasize more. But, this is underlying construction of my charachature of Brad Pit.

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So, a lot of people want to know how to draw skulls because let’s face it, skulls are cool. One really simple way that you can think of a skull is, imagine a loaf of bread that’s sort of rounded on top. And then you add sort of this little triangular shape under it, that sort of describes the jaw, and then boom, you’ve got your very basic skull shape right there.

One of the basic things you do when constructing a face, whether it’s a skull or an actual face, is to sort of plot this middle x and y-axis. The center line and the face sort of bulges outwards in the center, so my center line is curved. And then right in the center, you want to draw another line going like that, and that marks where your eyes are. And if you look at a face carefully, you’ll notice that the eyes fall directly in the center between the top and the bottom of the head.

One of the first things I usually think of is where the bridge of the nose is, this is kind of esoteric, but it really, really helps. When you look at people’s faces, you sort of see this triangular shape that describes the bridge of the nose. It’s not something that’s going to be in your final drawing, but this little area sort of helps you mark out how far apart the eyes are going to be and where the forehead starts, and where the nose connects to the bridge between the eyes, mark out the tops of the eye sockets.

I think the next most important thing about constructing your skull is to sort of see the cheekbones as the sort of square shape here. If you take another line, like here’s that center line that shows where the eyes are, maybe another line about halfway down or so, maybe a little above that describes about where the cheekbones are. The thing that makes the skull really realistic is if you have these cheekbones really well defined. There’s like a little hollow right here and this ridge kind of comes around the eye socket.

Again, to mark out the teeth, you’re just going to do another line, not quite three-quarters of the way down from the line that describes where the eyes are to the bottom of the chin. I always find it better to just think of the teeth as a solid shape, rather than a whole bunch of individual teeth.

There’s a little empty part that the jaw comes up and hinges back here by the ears. So I got my basic structure, it’s really easy. Just go in and start an actual line, and as I’m shading it, I’m sort of thinking of using these shading lines to describe the roundness.

One thing that helps your skulls look really realistic is there’s sort of a bulge right here over the eyes, you can think of it sort of like a jelly bean. Let’s imagine it like a jelly bean that goes over the eyes. Just give a little bit of shading to that and that helps really make it look like a realistic skull.

You’ve got the two middle teeth and then you sort of count out, one, two, and there’s this sort of canine shape to these two teeth. I think that sort of gives you a basic understanding of how to sketch out a skull, and the next video I’m going to relate that to how to think of the structure of a person’s skull when you’re drawing their face.

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You don’t try to draw something perfect right off the bat. You really just start scribbling and start having fun and thinking in terms of motion. And so let’s imagine I’m drawing a character running. The first thing I’m always going to do is just get the idea across. Hit it really fast. And I do my best to ,sort of, make it all one drawing and it can be as messy as it needs to be.

I try to think of the body as one single, flowing shape, rather than as a bunch of different mechanical parts. Even it can be a relatively quieter motion, like walking. I still try to really, kind of, bring it to life.

A character can even be sitting and not doing much of anything. But still, just different cues of how they’re sitting and how they’re holding their body can sort of show what that person is feeling and give you a sense of life. The best way to do it is really keep, just practice doing these, kind of, loose, gestural drawings.

The important thing is not to get self conscious or to try let go of that idea. Try to let go of the idea that what you’re doing needs to look right. Or, you know, try to forget about whatever mean art teacher who made you feel bad about your drawing in third grade. And try to just, you know, capture an idea of what a character is doing and then move on to the next thing.

One thing that helps me in this is that I’ve done a lot of figure drawing so I instinctively understand the proportions of the body. And when I’m drawing these quick lines I instinctively understand where all the bones are and all the muscles are. But at the same time, don’t get caught up in trying to make things look right. Don’t get caught up in trying to make that elbow look right. Just build this capacity to capture a quick sense of motion with a few quick lines and them moving on to the next thing.

Transcript

Moving on through celebrity caricatures, we’re going to try Justin Bieber now. I’ve never seriously looked at a picture of him in my life, I swear to God. So the first thing I noticed is that his face is a little bit elongated. That shows a photo of him where he’s got some of his hair off his forehead so that I could actually see the shape of his forehead. And there’s an edge from the outsides of his eye sockets down to his chin. I noticed there’s an edge right there that I’m going to play up.

You might notice I’m drawing with the pencil held sideways in my hand. It makes it harder to draw little tiny lines, so I don’t get as hung up on details. It just helps me block in simple shapes.

His nose sits very high on his face and is very, almost like pixie-ish. Probably that’s his unique facial structure, but it’s also just that he’s young and people’s noses tend to point upward when they’re younger and start pointing downward as they get older.

His mouth sits high, but his top lip is very full, almost like a bow, kind of feminine, no offense to him. He’s got a real pouty thing going on.

So even though those features are soft, there is a certain angular quality to them I’m trying to capture. I’m just going to start roofing in the outlines, but as I’m drawing the outlines of his face, I’m thinking all the time about where I think the edges of his skull are and where the landmarks of his skull are, that help me figure out the construction of his face. So even though I’m drawing his face just from one angle, I’m thinking of it in three dimensions. So in my head I’m building a three-dimensional object, even though I’m drawing a two-dimensional drawing. That’s a very important thing, is to really think, all the way around what you’re drawing and imagine the entire structure of it.

Even though his forehead is covered up mostly with hair, I took the time to construct where I think the lines of his skull are rather than just stop drawing at his hair and just fill that space up with hair. I’m going to really try to lay off the construction lines around his eyes because that will really age him.

Even though I’m thinking about the construction of his face, I’m thinking about where his eye sockets are and how his eyes fit into his eye sockets, I’m going to let those largely be invisible in the final drawing because it just wouldn’t look like him, because he’s young and he doesn’t have those landmarks. Those aren’t very prominent.

So that’s the beginnings of it. The next step would be to bring it into a light box, throw a piece of tracing paper over it, and start to refine the drawing more. If I’m doing a caricature, I might do 10 of these to really make sure that I have a firm handle on what I want to convey about that person’s face and personality.

Just as I’m looking at it now, I notice that he actually smirks when he smiles, like this corner of his mouth actually goes up a little higher than the other corner. So on the next stage of this drawing, when I’m tracing it onto a new piece of paper, I would address that.

That’s the basic structure of a caricature of Justin Bieber.

Transcript

Whether you’re an illustrator or a comic book artist or an animation artist, you’ll find that figure-drawing is sort of the foundation skill that builds a lot of those other skills. Even animation artists who draw Mickey Mouse kind of characters all day, they go to a lot of figure-drawing classes and they learn a lot of anatomy. Because even though they’re just drawing characters that are basically blobby shapes that move in impossible ways and do impossible things, they still want to understand how the body works.

Understanding those things and understanding them on a very deep level is what gives those characters a sense of reality. So, if you go to animation school, you’ll find that you’re going to do a lot of drawings from models. If you go to a figure-drawing class, it’s a good idea to find a class where the model is doing quick poses instead of just sitting in a chair like this for three hours. Maybe just doing 10-minute poses, 20-minute poses. Because that trains you to really look at the overall pose and get a quick sense of it and learn how to really, just with a few lines, capture the essence of the pose because that’s a really essential skill to learn.

It’s easy to sort of get hung up on trying to draw various details. You know, like maybe you start with a foot or you start with a hand. And then, 20 minutes later, the pose is over and you haven’t gotten any further than the hand because you were trying to get it right. You really, especially in the beginning, don’t think about drawing things right. Think about capturing the idea. Think about capturing a sense of motion, a sense of an object in space. So, you can see this is the same pose just from different angles and I’m learning about the way the muscles connect to the bones and all these different angles. But I’m also trying to capture just a quick sense of the flow of the body.

I’m starting out with getting a sense of how her hips are sitting on the ground and how this arm is holding the rest of the body up. And there’s sort of the muscular tension in that arm that’s holding her up. And if I just showed you this little piece, you wouldn’t even know what that is. It doesn’t look anything like a leg. It doesn’t look like much of anything. Because all I’m trying to do is capture the idea of a leg. And in context, it starts to sort of make sense.

And here again, I made sure to do a line that sort of describes where her spine is because that’s an important structural component. But really, these are just quick shapes that help me kind of understand the roundness of the character.

So, figure drawing is really important. And not as something to create finished drawings. Like, obviously, I’m not going to take these sketches I did in my notebook and sell them to anybody. But it’s really the gem. It’s really where you exercise your brain and your hand. And how you develop your own ideas of how figures to look and how they move. And it just makes you a better artist.

Transcript

Kind of the best thing to do when you’re drawing the nose is to kind of think of how it attaches to the face. So I might think of, right now I’m sort of drawing this triangular shape where it’s just where the nose actually attaches to the face, that sort of flat part where the nose attaches. And then think of it coming forward to sort of a pyramid, sort of a tip like that. So again, just imagine having sort of a pyramid that has sort of a long end. And then you can start adding the details.

The tip of the nose sort of has its own shape, if you really look at people’s noses. And then the long part of the nose has this sort of bony shape that looks like a long football. And that sort of attaches to this part. If you look at, kind of, older people’s noses, you can sort of see a little more of this structure. But all noses have the same structure. It’s just put together differently, and some people you can see the structure better than others.

And then the nostrils have sort of their own shape. It’s like it’s two kind of ball shapes on the side. Then even the bottom kind of has a unique shape. Again, unless you really study it, it’s hard to see it. But the bottom part of the nose kind of comes down like this. And that middle part between the nostrils sort of joins up to the tip like that. And once you’ve got that, then it starts to get easy to really make stress. I think it looks realistic.

Most of these things, like, I tell people to sort of ignore the complexity. But the nose is something that’s actually good to kind of pay more attention to the complexity of it than you really see. Because it really does have a very subtle construction that’s hard to see, but if you can really master it, it makes your drawings look much more realistic.

So I’ll just do a side view too. Again, it’s great to start with just a simple triangular shape and work from there. So once you sort of have those basic elements in place that make up the shape of the nose, you can sort of look at different people’s noses and see how those same elements are sort of put together into different shapes. So some people have big, protruding noses that sort of turn downward, but again, it’s all the same construction.

If you just really look at different people’s noses, some people have little, tiny noses that turn up like that. But, again, they’re all made up of the same, basic shapes. It’s always good to just really study people and just draw and draw and draw constantly, and that’s what really going to make this stuff come second nature for you. So you get to a point where you don’t really have to think about the construction of things, you can just start drawing away.

Transcript

So moving on with drawing celebrity caricatures, I’m going to try Katie
Perry now. This is as much of a process of exploration for me as it is for
you. I’m just going to start, very roughly, blocking in what I see as the
structure of her face. What I’m doing right now is I’m, sort of, sketching
out the landmarks that I see on her face and I’m going a little bit faster
than I can really even explain it.

You might notice I did most of this drawing by holding my pencil sideways
because that’s one way that I just, sort of, block in the shapes and it
prevents me from getting to hung up on the details. Because, the first
step to me is just to, sort of, find the structure and try to refine the
details from there.

So, I’ve got that blocked in enough that I think I’m ready to move on to
the final line. Like I said, I’m going to leave out a lot of those
construction lines that I created when I started sketching her, but I’m
thinking about them. Again, I’m very conscious that I don’t what to make
this corner of the draw to strong because that will start to really look
like the drag queen. I’m just very conscious of not wanting to make it too
strong and masculine looking. I tend to think of eyebrows as more solid
shaped here that, sort of, elbows and then curves around and, sort of,
tapers. I tend to draw the lashes as just a solid block. In this case,
I’m adding a few little lashes coming out of that solid mass just because
the lashes are so noticeable. I roughed her mouth out as a very square
shape. I, sort of, constructe it as a series of square shapes. Now, I’m
rounding it much more in the final execution. I’m going to just turn my
pencil sideways and just, sort of, start blocking in the hair as a solid
mass. It just gets me through it a lot faster than if I try to draw
individual hairs.

So, my next step would be to through this on the light box or throw a piece
of tracing paper over it and I’d start to refine the drawing further and
tighten it up further. And, I’d probably notice things that I don’t like
about my drawing but I want to fix. And as I keep going, I’ll change
things more and more. I, sort of, feel like this chin might be a little
too strong still and I might address that in the next version. But, this
just gives you and idea of how to draw a caricature of Katie Perry.

Transcript

For me the best way to start is to think of that you hand it’s sort of a bow. Just kind of start like that, like you can literally just imagine it’s a box. Think of the fingers as just cylinders, the important thing is to just start constructing form simple shapes. You can start, thinking of the fingers as just literally just cylinders. Then come off the, top of the box, they thumb again is just another cylinder that just comes off the side. The thumb takes on the appearance not exactly a perfect cylinder but it has to get a little wider at the base. So, test about like that, and, and then once you got that you just start, make it realistic. You could actually just try your details over this geometric construction you have laid down. But the important things is to learn the very basic components of things, once you have soft of a very basic construction then you worry about it.

With the actual details alright. – So again let’s say, let’s take 1 of the harder, sort of angles of drawing a hand at. Like a lot of people have a hard time say with [?] hand, like a hand that’s coming at a camera like that. So, again your just thinking of a simpler instruction. In this case your gonna start with that box that makes the middle of the hand in this kind of box, your gonna be soft of tilted at the camera. – And then I’m gonna attach the fingers on the end, and just again they’re cylinders and in this case they’re coming straight out of the camera… Another little trick when your drawing hands, a lot of the time you can sort of plot a curved line that describes the arc of the finger tips. So in this case even as I’m drawing these I’m sort of imagining there’s sort of a simple arc that describes the finger. You’ll sort of find if you put your fingers in different positions, you’ll sort of find that a lot of times there is sort of a, they do make sort of a graceful art. So they’re sort of a, an art between the finger tips and you can sort of plot an arc for each of the knuckles and that just kind of help you plot all of these different points. And I’m gonna add a thumb, a thumb can just be really tricky. But and the thumb kind of attach like in this case, here’s the palm of my hand the thumb is gonna kind of attach to the palm like that, it sort of overlaps the palm.

So I’m gonna, do 1 of these. Then again now that I got my basic structure, now is where I actually start making it look like a hand. – When I’m adding these shading lines, I’m doing it to sort of describe the light hitting the object but it also just soft of describes the roundness because basically your drawing, in lines on a flat piece of paper so what your trying to do is create the illusion that something is round. So, when I add shading lines and stuff I’m always kind of, you can see where I’m kind of rounding them and just describe. It helps describe the curve, the edge of that finger, it helps sort of make that finger look 3 dimensional. You can just create these simple shapes that, really quickly get across the gesture of any hand gesture. – The important thing to remember is to, simplify everything down to it’s very basic shapes and once you have that very simple construction now you can start worrying about details, and adding finger nails, and knuckles, and those things that make them look like an actual hand.

Transcript

The misconception is that an eye is just shaped like a football with that eyeball in the center, but of course, it’s much more complicated than that. Imagine this is the center of my face, here. There’s a point here in the middle, so you have this diagonal line and then another diagonal that comes down, and then the bottom, I usually think of as a curve shape, a little like that football shape. Having this shape is what really makes it look like a real eye.

There’s usually this little fold of skin over the eyelid. It doesn’t just go over the top of the eye like that. It’s usually drifts a little more to the center, so it catches the eye on the outside, and then, just in the center like that.

That’s one thing that really differentiates different people’s faces, is some people have very little, the fold is not very noticeable over the top of their eyes and then other people have a very noticeable fold above their eyes.

I tend to think about the bottom part of the eye socket and how that creates the folds of the lower lid. It’s usually this, kind of a line about that like. I don’t know, some people it’s very subtle. Some people it’s very noticeable. But there’s this fold that creates the shape of the lower lid. There’s always this shape here where the eyes meets the nose and flows down.

I tend to think of breaking things down to their simplest shapes and the eyelashes can be bunched into a single mass. If you can really really learn these shapes, how the eye sockets flows into the bridge of the nose, it really helps your characters look realistic.

It’s also good to really think about the actual eyeball having a roundness to it, because it’s really just a ball shape. Next, I’ll show you the eye from a side view. I’m imagining that my person is looking this way. It angles forward like this, then you draw a triangle shape.

You notice I’m just changing some of these lines as I go. A big part of drawing is finding the shape as you go and that’s what all this sketching is for. I would love it if I could just always draw a perfect face the first time out, but usually I have to sketch around a little bit and play with it and find what I want to draw.

And right now I’m just thinking of the center of the eye socket flows into the side of the nose.

There’s this little lip right here on the lower eyelid. That’s where the lower lashes are.

As with all things, you’re going to get better the more you do it, so just keep drawing and draw everything around you and really learn how things look for yourself.