How to Draw a Cartoon Character Outline

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Danny Page and I'm here on behalf of Expert Village. In this series I'm going to teach you how to draw basic cartoon characters. Alright, for this next step we're going to actually get rid of our friend the black Sharpie for a moment. We'll get to him later, but we're going to be doing a little outlining and basically what outlining is it's a step that sometimes the more experienced animators and cartoonists skip over because they're a little bit more familiar and more comfortable with the sketching process. But if you're just kind of starting out and learning the basic uses and designs of different shapes and how they fit in to your finished drawing this is a good step to kind of help you get a good foundation for the character that you're eventually going to create. So what we'll do is take our pencil and we're just going to go over this page and just visualize what the final outcome is going to be. Mainly the dimensions, how big, how wide, how is everything going to fit and what you're going to do is just kind of lightly here, you're going to kind of draw in the rough foundations for the character and the shapes. All it really is it's just giving you sort of road maps to come back over later and you'll have this sort already predetermined outline that will help you has you're finally going to this thing with ink. And what we're doing here, it's kind of hard for you to see I know, but I'm just kind of lightly drawing circles, ovals and other different shapes with this pencil to kind of get myself a rough idea of how I'm going to craft this character on paper. And all you really need to do is lightly go over the page with your pencil and just the different shapes that you want are mostly going to be ovals, circles, just lightly drawn there on the page and watch your character slowing take shape. You're not going to stick to this religiously, but basically it's just meant to be a rough outline so that when you come back with your permanent pen you won't be intimidated by the blank page. You'll have road map to follow as you craft and create your character.

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