Any tips on drawing toons? Been practicing with the 40's balloons and hoses style but I want to branch out a little more. Still loving your art!
Thanks a ton, I’m glad you dig it! And congrats on getting into that arts program too! Kinda had to rack my brains a little here being asked for advice and all, I’m hardly an expert and I’m always looking at my own stuff and fretting over how I could make it better. I guess I couldn’t tell you much that a good book or better artist couldn’t, but I’ll pretend I know what the heck I’m talkin’ about for a little bit to save face, haha. This’ll be a chatty one so apologies for that!
–My biggest tip actually doesn’t have much to do with the physical process of drawing cartoons, but more the inspiration end of it! I think it’s obvious that people that are into toons grew up on a healthy diet of ‘em, be it your Jay Ward or Ub Iwerks, Hanna-Barbara or Disney or Warner Bros. I myself grew up with my dad’s huge bootleg VHS collection in the 80s and loved watching the old Looney Tunes (and their direct inspirations, Three Stooges and Marx Bros. and Laurel and Hardy and whatnot) and come the 90s I was all about Tiny Toons and Animaniacs. In fact, that Sammy character I draw, I’ve been doodling her since about 1995. Guess what she looked like!
Heeyy, embarrassing! But as I got older the big thing I learned was that expanding your pool of artistic inspiration does a ton for you. Inspiration isn’t necessarily “I like what this artist does, so I’ll just draw like that artist!” It’s about what you learn from their craft and how you can translate that into your own way of drawing. I fell in love with cartoonists like Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe (you may know him from doing character design in Disney’s Hercules!), and German Expressionism artists like Otto Dix, who showed me that the way you craft your linework can be a powerful emotional force. I’m a big fan of Russian Constructivism, where you learn simple shapes and good composition can convey information even when it’s abstracted, and then you can apply that theory to master graphic artists like Paul Rand and Saul Bass.
–With that out of the way, a big thing to keep in mind when drawing toony is to keep it simple! This doesn’t mean you can’t buck that idea a bit when you’ve gotten good at it of course, but still the central idea is clarity and elegant simplicity of form–the anatomy of your average toon ain’t too complex, just a lot of shapes. Some of the most well known cartoon characters are ones whose constructions are so stripped down that they become iconographic in a way, and one can easily recognize a character even from a simple silhouette. For gamers, this was design philosophy for the characters in Team Fortress 2, where being able to know what class of character coming at you from a distance is helpful to the player. The characters all have their little accessories and all that, but overall their shapes are crisp and distinct. So you take a figure, strip it down to its components so only the important bits are left–Pablo PIcasso did an amazing print series exploring this concept. This was necessary in animation both because it made things easier to deal with in production, and because it simply looks better to the eye when you’ve got these characters moving and doing all this wacky stuff. As a reference for someone that’s amazing at simplifying figures in a beautiful way, I’d check out Charley Harper.
–That’s the overall shapes, but for linework I like to think back to when I was working as a caricature artist under Gary Fasen. His big thing was what he called line economy; i.e., when you’re drawing something cartoonish, it’s imperative that that every line you put down ought to be doing something. Superfluous lines do little else but muddle or confuse a drawing when you’re working with character that don’t even need a lot of lines to begin with–lines are information, and cartoons are like a practical phone call. Say what needs to be said and be done with it! One guy that was a master with this stuff was Al Hirschfeld, god-tier caricature artist who was able to successfully convey a distinct human face and body while using minimalist, gorgeously flowing lines, making sure each one is pulling their weight.
–Of course, one of the big things in cartoons is to exaggerate! We love cartoons just because of how wonderfully weird the dang things look, and don’t ever feel like you need to hold back when you’re just messing around. I know at Pixar one thing they like to say is that if you’ve got an idea that you think pushes the envelope, best thing to do isn’t to dial it back but to crank it up to 11. When you’re in the design process, why not go for broke, really? It’s better for you to have gone a little nuts, come back later and go “eehh I’ll shave that back a little bit” than to never have pushed yourself at all, not knowing that your character design might have benefited from it. A couple films that have just hilariously exaggerated animation and character design (and, as it happens, successfully do all the other things I’ve been yammering about) are probably pretty well known to animation buffs, but they are for a reason, ainna? Check out Triplets of Belleville and the fan-made “Recobbled” version of Richard Williams’ The Thief and the Cobbler. The way they exaggerate the human form is just beautifully bizarre!
–Finally, more important than any of this is to loosen up and have some damn fun! Art suffers from hesitation and self-consciousness, and that translates into stifled ideas, lines that lack confidence, color palettes that aren’t as weird and funky as they could be! Move your arm. Draw a sweeping line that flows from a character’s head right to their toes and build around it. Toons always have fun, shouldn’t you?
And I guess that’s about! Apologies to anyone that has this big dumb block o’ text on their dashboard that has to scroll through it–but whatever, thanks for the question, @tcart96!
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