How To Draw Cartoons: Let's Draw a Dog...from Sketch to Finished Design!

In today's video, I'm going to show you how you can draw this cartoon dog using the iPad and Procreate. It's all in real time too so you can follow along every step of the way from the basic sketch process using simple shapes to refining the sketch, adding the inks, the color flats, shadows, highlights, and finally a background. There's no time lapse, no edits, so if you want to follow along step by step and draw with me, keep watching. All right guys, so let's go ahead and draw a cartoon dog. Starting out, I'm using a 3000 by 3300 dpi canvas, so RGB canvas. For my brush, I'm going to start out sketching so I'm going to use my 9B pencil, which is part of my pencil pack available for Procreate. And for my color palette, I've got this pre-made, so if you want to follow along with the exact same colors that I'm using in today's tutorial, you can download this for free if you just go to my website bjdell.com underneath the YouTube reference materials page, which I will link this down in the description below too. You will find that color palette along with the video at the top of the page that walks you through how to install a color palette in Procreate if you're new to it. So download that, follow along, and let's get started. So like I said, cartoon dog. I've done cartoon dog tutorials before on my YouTube channel, but most of my other videos too, not just the cartoon dog ones, are from a front perspective or three quarters. I thought it'd be kind of fun today to do a side profile view. So that's the perspective we're going to use. We're going to do some crazy proportions too. That's what I want to kind achieve with this video. So let's start out sketching just really basic shapes. So I'm going to have just an oval here. This is going to be representing where the head's going to go. And then let's go ahead and do another oval here. This is for the snout. From here then, a third oval on top. It's going to be where the nose goes. And you can see I'm just using really simple shapes to kind of flesh out what I have in my mind. I know a lot of new artists starting out. They really want to jump in and just start drawing the outlines for their design and kind of put the cart before the horse. And this is the way really that you should start out drawing, whether you're a new artist or a seasoned professional doing basic shapes like this. This is going to be the ear. So we're blocking out where we want everything before we even get too detailed in here. If you're an artist that struggles with kind of seeing something in your mind's eye, and then once you go to actually put it on the page or in this case on the iPad screen, you can't get it. This is the best way to make it happen. Let's do a really long neck coming up here. Once again, that crazy perspective. Kind of block in an oval here where the collar is going to go. And of course he's going to have a dog tag kind of coming down here. And then let's do the eye. Kind of want a spot on his eye, I think. So we'll draw a big oval here for the spots and then a smaller circle or oval in there for the actual eye. And there you go. That's going to be the basic shape of our design. If you're new to my channel, you're looking at this probably going, okay, what is going on here? That doesn't really look like anything right now. Stick with the video because the next step, we're going to kind of finalize the sketch. It's going to get more detailed and you're going to see it come to life. So stick with it. Let's ahead and do that next. So to finalize the sketch, I'm going to come up here to my layers menu and I'm going to make a new layer. A lot of times I'll draw on top of this sketch, but I think for this one, we'll draw separately on a new layer so you can see how they differ from one another. To do this though, we're going to drop the opacity of our first sketch layer down to about 50% so we can draw on top and we're not too distracted by what's already there. And then this layer here is going to be our new sketch layer. So you're going to see, I'm going to start pressing down harder now with the pencil and this brush that I'm using here. That's why I like this one is because of the pressure sensitivity of the iPad and the Apple Pencil and the way the brush is made. You can get some really dark lines or you can get really light lines like this. Here, let me go ahead and work on this. Now you're going to watch here, I'm not really going to trace and follow this per se. So I'm just using these lines here, my initial sketch as kind of a guide. I'm not 100% tracing them. I don't want to rely on those too much. I'm going to start to add in details now. So I've got kind of a cheek coming around here. Let's go ahead and have the eyes come up here. Another diagonal line this way. This is a really kind of nice profile view perspective here of the eye. Get the pupil in there and the iris coming around. Looks good. From here, let's go ahead and get the oval in here for coming around the eye. Looks pretty good right there. Do an eyebrow in here, which you can see here, I don't have that actually sketched in here on the initial sketch. So I'm just kind of adding in details as I go along here. Next up, let's bring these tufts of hair around here. Kind of have the brow coming out here and you'll see here, I'm not going to follow this around. I kind of want this to curve just like this bottom one did. So as I bring this around, you're going to see it follows that same curve. I can get it where I want it to be. A little bit closer in here to the nose. You can see what that does is it just works as that guide so I can visualize where everything's going to go. I'm not worried about tracing it 100%. We'll get that bottom lip and chin kind of area there. Bring the ear around here. Once again, with this too, not tracing the sketch, just kind of using it as a guide where everything's going to go. And we'll get the neck in here with the collar. And this collar, got that medallion quite a bit further up than what I had in the sketch, but that's okay. I'm not really worried about it. I like the look of it, like where it's at. And then probably throw in some just spots around there. So there we go. That's going to be my sketch that I'm going to base my actual design off of. So if I come in here now to my layers menu and I turn off that first sketch layer, this is the sketch I'm now left with. Now we're ready to go in and actually do the inking process. So to do the inks, what I'm going to do is I'm going to come up here to my layers menu. I'm going to make a new layer. This is going to be our inks layer. And then I'm going to go ahead and tap the end here for the blend mode and drop the opacity down on that sketch layer again. With that turned down now, I'm going to come up here to my brush library and I'm going to switch over to my cartooning pack. I'm going to use my standard inker streamline to do the inks for this. Once again, I'm on this top layer now. And before I do the inks, I want to decide where's my light source coming in from. I use a lot of different line weights in my work and to decide the sizes of the line weights, the weights of the individual lines, the light source is going to determine those. So anything further away from the light source is going to be a thicker line. Anything closer to the light source where the highlights are, that's going to be a thinner line. So on this one, I think we'll have the light source coming in here from this top right-hand corner. So anything here, lighter line weight, anything as we move further back here, that's going to be a thicker line weight. So now that we've got that decided, we can go ahead and start filling in our inks. I'm going to drag and drop this into here. Coming back up then to the top menu, I'm going to use the eraser using my standard inker streamline. I'm going to go ahead and add a highlight here along the nose, just kind of erase there. We'll fill it in later with white. Now that we've got that back to my brush and I'll go ahead and get the mouth here. We're going to have a kind of thicker line down here, around and coming up. You'll see once again, I'm kind of fine tuning things as I'm going. I'm not tracing my sketch. Like when I laid down that second version of the sketch, I wasn't tracing it then. I'm not tracing it now. I want to keep it nice and kind of fluid. I want to have a pretty organic feel to my strokes. And if you worry about trying to stay on top and trace that sketch layer, your lines are going to start to look a little too mechanical, a little too kind of planned out. Here, I am kind of trying to get this close to what I've got laid down there, the way that it connects to the nose. So I did want to get a little bit closer there, but for the most part here, I just really want to play kind of loose with it and not worry about getting everything 100% traced to where it was on that sketch. You can see as I'm doing this, the lines are kind of in the general area, but they're not perfect. And that's what I'm going for. I'm going to zoom in here so we can see this a little bit better as I lay this line in here for the eye. One of my recommendations too, I try not to do it too much in my videos, but if you are using an iPad or any digital art, I really recommend you zooming in and out as much as possible. If your design looks really good close up, if your lines look really good when you zoom out and further away, they're going to look even better. So if you can get in there really tight, so like areas like this, maybe up in the eye and the eyebrow, if you can get in here really tight and get these lines really nice and crisp close up, once you zoom out, they're going to look that much better. So if you're using digital art, definitely use it to your advantage. There's so many tools that you have that's going to make your art really that much better. So feel free to zoom in and out as much as possible. Like I said, in the videos, I don't do it that much because I know it's hard to follow. In my own personal work, when I'm doing this, I zoom in and out like crazy. So for me, it's kind of hard sometimes to not do it in my videos because I am so used to doing it in my regular work that I do personally. But use it while you've got it and while you can. Get this medallion or name tag in here. The extra line here kind of coming around for that perspective there. Maybe a couple of dots in here on the snout. And then we can go ahead and get these extra circles around here for the spots on his body. All right, so that's going to be pretty much it for the inks. Let's go ahead and come up here to our layers menu. I'm going to turn off the sketch layer and that's what we're left with. So that's going to be our inked design. From here, we are ready to start coloring in. So to begin coloring, number one, what we want to do is we want to set layer three to reference. So tapping on layer three, setting that to reference, that's going to allow us to drag and drop colors in on a totally separate layer. Using layer three is kind of the guide where everything goes. So with that set there, we're going to come under layer three now and we're going to make a new layer. This is going to be our color flats layer. So with that selected, coming up here to our colors palette again, I'm going to go ahead and select this first gray color. We'll drag and drop that in for the body. And then let's also use that for that top eyelid there. Back up to our colors palette again, this darker gray here, we'll use that for the spots. So the one around the eye and then the ones here. Now a really quick way of filling this in, if you watch as I drag and drop this in, here it'll say continue filling with recolor. If we tap that, it brings up this cursor. Now it filled in everything that color, but if we drag this and tap it here to fill in, you'll see it just does that spot. Now we can actually just tap inside here. It allows us to fill in super quick and easy. We don't have to drag and drop every time. It's a huge time saver. So definitely use that when you can. Back to our color palette, darker gray here, filling in the eyebrow with that. We've got white next. So if I go ahead and turn off the background here, you can see it looks like the eye and the nose are filled in, but they're not. We just have the background turned white. So we need to come in here, fill those in, also those spots inside of the eye. So now we can turn our background back on. Back to our color palette using that blue color here, filling in the eye, use that for the collar, and then back to the color palette, the gold here for the little tag on the collar. All right. So there we go. Color flats are done. You can see that's a pretty simple step on the design process. The inks take a little bit longer. Sketch takes a little bit longer. The color flats, quickest one. So we're done with that. Now we can move on to shadows and highlights. So for shadows and highlights, what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and make a new layer on top of our color flats. It's underneath our lines layer. Then we're going to tap on that, and we're going to set this as clipping mask. So what this does is it's going to allow us to color in on this layer separately from our color flats layer, but using clipping mask, it's only going to show up on the parts that are colored in on that color flats layer. So if we go out here, outside of the lines, it's not even going to show up. So it saves you some hassle of trying to stay in the lines. So with that set, we're going to come up here to our color palette. We're going to tap on the purple that we have right here. That is going to be our shadow color. Remember, we've got the light source coming in from here. So we're going to kind of have a shadow here on the bottom of the snout. We'll get that filled in, erase that overlap there. I'm also going to go ahead and come up here to my layers menu, and I'm going to turn off reference. So this way we can get some big areas filled in. Once they're connected, we can drag and drop them in. We just want to make sure that that's turned off. So with that turned off, we can move back to our shadows layer. And then I'm just going to kind of follow this around, like I said, light source here. So this back here is going to be kind of shadowed in. Once we get a decent area filled in and connected here, then we can just drag and drop that color in. It's going to fill it in really quick. And you'll see here as I'm doing this, I kind of want these lines to follow the curves that I've already laid down with the inks layer. So I went back in and added more of a curve here. So it met up here a little bit nicer. I'm going to follow these curves here underneath the eye. I always like to put in shadows there in between the eyelid and underneath the eyebrow. Kind of makes them pop a little bit more. Pull those there. Pull the curve here down and around. Let's meet up with the eyebrow here. Then once we get to an area that we've got everything connected, the lines match up, and drag and drop it in. And it fills it in just a lot faster than doing it all by hand. The back of the collar here, have that kind of curve around here down to the body. Once again, any parts that I go outside of, just come back in here and erase the underside of this. And I think actually that's going to be pretty good. We'll probably have this kind of come down more around the nose here, because the nose is going to give off a pretty big shadow there. So kind of pull that down a little bit more around the nose. And that should be good. So let's go ahead and come up here to our layers menu again. We're going to tap the N here for the blend mode. We're going to drop down the opacity here. We've got that down to about 25%. I think it's pretty good there. And the one thing here, I'm going to change how this comes up a little bit, because like I said, I like to have it flow with the curve. So I'm going to have this come up with that curve, but then I'm gonna have another curve in here for the nose. So it maintains that same curve coming around there. And that's just one thing that you're going to kind of get good at once you've done this for a while and you start to do a lot of the shadows and stuff, you're going to start to see little things like that. Maybe after you have them in there and say, okay, this could look a little bit better if I go in there and fix that. And I really urge you to kind of take a step back and do those kinds of things. Now that shadows are done, let's come up here to the layers menu again, make another new layer. We're going to tap this one and set this one as clipping mask as well. This is going to be for our highlights. So back to our color palette again, we're going to choose white. Once again, light source is coming in from this way. So we're just going to throw in some highlights here along this front edge, throw on a little few oval highlights here as well. So we got a little bit more of a layer there. Let's get those in there here towards the front of that brow coming down and around, around the front of this cheek as well. I'm going to zoom in here because I'm getting a little bit tighter in here. So it's going to be harder to get these lines to flow. So we'll get in there closer. Maybe one here on the front of that eyelid. And the same thing here, kind of having that flow a little bit better with that line. Once I get in there tighter, I can see it a little bit better. Now, once that's done coming back up to our layers menu, hitting that N again for blend mode and dropping this back down like so, we can drop the opacity of that. So it deadens that bright white, makes it a little bit nicer there. That looks good. And then if we want to, we can add in maybe one here. It's not going to be a lot of highlights here because honestly, that snout's going to block a lot of that light coming in there. And then I'm going to make this flow a little bit better into here. I'm going to curve this line up and kind of taper it around. Just looks a little odd having it follow that perfectly. All right. So there we go. That's pretty much the finished design. From here, let's just go ahead and make a quick background. So if I come up here to my layers menu again, going down here to the very bottom, making a new layer, grabbing my color palette again. I've got this orange here. I'm just dragging and dropping this in to the background there. Then from here, I'm just going to grab the arrow with distort selected. Just kind of make this funky kind of design here in the back, something like that. So it's not plain, gives a little bit of color pop there in the background. And then finally, I just need to sign it. So I'm going to come up to my inks layer, my lines layer and get this guy signed and we will be done. So, all right, there we go. Pretty quick tutorial today on drawing a cartoon dog from that side profile view perspective, which was some crazy proportions going on to using those basic shapes to lay everything out. Hopefully you liked today's video. Hopefully you got some valuable information out of it. Enjoyed it. If you did, make sure you give it a thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet and hit that bell for notifications so you can get alerted when I post new videos. If you guys take part in any of these tutorials and you follow along and you post your work online, which I encourage you to do if you're on Instagram or Twitter, definitely tag me at BJ Dell. I want to see what you guys come up with. It's always a joy seeing everybody's takes on these. It's so much fun to see and I love it. So definitely post away. Or if you're on Facebook, I do have a group over there called Keep Creating a Group for Artists by Artists. I'll link it down in the description below. A place where you can share your designs based on these tutorials or just really any artwork at all. A place where you can give feedback, get feedback, meet new people. It's an awesome place to be. I want you guys to be a part of it as well. That's it for today's video. Thanks for tuning in and until next time, keep creating.