Cartoon Drawing Tips: How to Add Depth and Life to Your Drawing

You are a cartoon fan who loves to draw and show your masterpieces to your friends, parents and teachers. And they appreciate him for his work. But sometimes you yourself are engulfed by a feeling of inadequacy, a feeling that the drawings you create lack a life of their own. It is true that what you do is good in terms of details, but still for some reason unknown to you, it seems flat.

If the lines above describe your situation, don’t be frustrated. Let me tell you that you are not alone, there are many beginners who are facing this problem. But fortunately you are different, you are reading this article and it shows that you are brainstorming to take some action to address the problem. I ask you to keep reading, you are about to discover a series of simple things that applied to your drawing will make it more realistic.

Often times, beginners very concerned with getting the basic form correct ignore this area. They spend a considerable amount of time getting good at drawing hands, practicing for hours to learn about the various shapes of the human nose.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to say that these exercises are not required or to suggest that you can draw beautiful figures without being good with these skills. The only thing I’m trying to emphasize here is that along with these details, some softer aspects are also important in bringing the characters and the entire composition to life.

Therefore softer skills should be given equal importance and these will help add depth to your drawing. Here in this article, I talk about the social skills that will make your drawing stand out from the crowd.

1. Make wise use of shadows in your drawing.

Keep in mind that adding shadows to your drawing doesn’t have to be difficult. Because you will not add perfect real life shadows in your drawing what you will add are indicative shadows, this is basically for two main purposes.

To. It will transmit the weight of your fingers,

without this, your characters will appear to float in the air. Imagine how amazing your work will be to look at.

B. By using shadows in your drawing you can convey the time of day and the mood of your composition.

If it’s noon [or the mood of the composition is bright] the shadows will be deeper while at night or the mood is not as euphoric the shadow will be lighter.

2. Make sure your characters wear clothing that is in line with current fashion, unless of course you are trying to portray historical figures. If you do this, your viewers will relate to the character in a better way subconsciously. When selecting the color and patterns of clothing, make sure that they are compatible with the mood of the composition. The bottom line is that the more you align your characters with the imagination of your viewers, the more acceptance you will receive.

If you are trying to represent a historical period in your drawing, make sure that your knowledge of the period you are trying to capture is sufficient for the job. Even if you are creating a comic strip, you will need to do your research diligently and sufficiently. Just think of Asterix and how detailed those fun characters are in terms of clothing, character hairstyles, etc.

3. Don’t underestimate the power of action lines: Action lines are lines that are used primarily in cartoons to convey the movement of characters. When telling a story with your drawing, the task at hand would require drawing figures that jump, run, or participate in different kinds of interesting activities. And there is no better way to represent and make these actions credible than by using lines of action. Carefully used lines of action can bring your action heroes to life.

4. When you are not sure how to express an emotion through the body language of your character. Go in front of a mirror and hold and process the thought that your character is supposed to have in his own mind and take a close look at his body language and facial expression. Then create the character using the image you just saw in the mirror.

5. Accessories are important too, unless the style of the accessories and their arrangement go well with the story, your character may look like a fish out of water. But on the contrary, if the accessories are compatible, it will greatly enhance the credibility of your creation.

6. Use line thickness to your advantage – don’t create the entire drawing with lines of uniform thickness, especially when creating an outdoor scene. Use thinner lines to represent remote objects and thicker lines for objects that are close to the viewer. Also, don’t forget to make remote objects smaller than objects of the same size that are close to the viewer. Following these two guidelines will automatically add a sense of depth to your composition.

7. Learn to draw animals: When it comes to drawing good pictures, people usually do not realize the fact, unless we achieve a certain level of competence in drawing animals, especially common animals such as cats, horses and dogs, we will have a hard time making a drawing that will really be a pleasure to look at. So here I suggest that you reflect and take time to improve this skill.

Take this as an open opportunity because many artists spend so much time honing their human drawing skill that the skill of drawing animals is hard to come by. If you are moderately good at drawing animals, you will be in a clearly advantageous position as an artist.

So if you’re serious and want to make improvements to the drawing you produce, read the tips and advice above again and start using them today.

As a fun and simple exercise, now have some of the drawings you have made in a safe place where you can easily reach them whenever you want. Now follow the suggestions given for 2 months. And at the end of the second month compare both sets of pictures and see the difference, if you have been sincere, you yourself will notice the difference.

Remember that the techniques presented here are simple and doable, so you have no excuse to postpone their adoption.