Cartoon Character Design for Beginners

Hi, my name is Christopher Hart. I'm a cartoonist and author of many books, how to draw cartoons, a manga, figure drawing, animals, tons of stuff. I'm glad you're visiting me today and my YouTube, and I'd like to show you how to draw a type of character I really enjoy, and that's a cartoon genius, a kid who's a genius. So I'm going to just sketch a minute first, and then we'll darken it in. And I start with a very big head, a vertical oval. That's because he's got so much brains that we have to make room for them. I'll give him a little kind of rectangular body underneath, very slight, like so. And I'll divide that in half so that he's, he's wearing shorts. And we'll bring really skinny legs down together, right down the center. Here's the center line of the whole character, the head and the body. I'll taper those legs down a little bit, like so, down to, I'll give him some socks, straight line across, and some shoes. Definitely not sneakers because he has no athletic ability. We're using stereotypes here of what we think a genius might be. I think Albert Einstein set the mold. Albert Einstein, great guy. I really love his work. Well, it's all relative. Sorry, sorry. I should do this whole video over again because of that terrible joke. Okay, so there we go. We have a lot of them, all right. And we'll also give him a little collar here. And because he is, he's already a nerd, which is nice. I'm just going to shave this in a bit. And because he's very slight and doesn't pose with a lot of authority, we'll put his hands behind his back. I'm going to slenderize this a little bit like that. Make that slightly concave so that we take away any width to the shoulders. We'll give him oversized sleeves. If he's swimming in his clothing, then it makes him look even more slight. So, you know, we have to caricature not just the face, but the clothes and the pose. I didn't mean to rhyme that. I did not mean to rhyme that. Don't give me any credit for that. All right, so we're going to now make kind of noodley arms. I'll actually put the hands in the pockets. And the reason the arms are noodley is because we want to make it look like, you know, he's got absolutely no muscle tone. Now let's go with the face. I'll give a few buttons down. Okay, we'll start with the nose, the bridge of the nose really small down here, very pointy. And we're going to give him gigantic glasses. I want to make them round coming just off the head. I'll darken these in a minute. Just touching the parameter of the header just a little bit, a little beyond it. Let's not go a little beyond it, okay? That should be fun. And we'll give him a little small smile, a little tiny smile. And we're going to make know-it-all type of eyes, which are like so. Just simple closed eyes. Each one is the shape of a U, like that. And we'll give him little eyebrows, but inside the glasses. Let's connect those glasses like so. And now we'll darken that in. Give me a minute. Hang with me. You've got to have some thickness on the rims. Okay, now the other one. Now you can use a template if you want to make the circles perfectly circular. But, you know, it doesn't really matter. It may matter in animation. If you were to animate the character, you want to always be consistent. But for our purposes, we can do this and really everyone will be fine with it. All right, so he's a real know-it-all. Let's bring the face down into the collar. Don't you just hate him? I mean, this kind of kid. Teacher, you forgot to give us homework. I still have a resentment toward that person all these years later. Okay, so let's give a part on the side like this. I'm going to erase this, by the way. Get this out of here. And now we'll give him a lot of curly hair, but with big bumps, not small. You don't want to be subtle. This is a cartoon. And in cartoons, subtlety isn't always an advantage. You really have to shout it. So let's make his hair look really curly like this. And I'm going to bring the elbow bend a little further down. That's better. Same thing on the other side. It needs to be symmetrical. And now bring this part out, right, the shirt, into the shoulders, and I can erase the top here. Let's quickly do this just to give it some tone and a line here for the ground. Notice that it doesn't go across the socks. Sock line is above it. Otherwise, it'll give the illusion that it's cutting through the legs. All right, so there is your Kooky Crazy Genius, and I hope you like it. Thank you for visiting me, and I have new videos uploaded each week. I hope you subscribe. Bye-bye. I'm the author of many popular how-to-draw books on everything from cartooning to manga. I upload new videos each week, so please subscribe and enjoy.