Character drawing made simple and fast | A quick drawing demonstration

What is Character Drawing?

Character Drawing is often made for illustrating cartoons, storyboard, animation films or comic books. Character is not just a person or an object. It is the personality of the character shown in a drawing. When you design any character, Basic expressions of the personality should be drawn to attention.

Character Drawing & Reference

Step 01: Keep a reference

As shown in the above picture, one may capture a reference for your drawing. This helps your work made easy and simple. Specially the character posing and the balance becomes much easier and need not spend more time on tweaking the pose. Since, the particular above character is more of human form, I have simply taken a photograph for reference. However, keeping a reference for your art work in initial stage even it is an abstract character or a non-human form character.

Step 02: Start with outlines

You can always start with basic circles and lines. Firstly, this will help you to measure the layout to the drawing object. Secondly, your object outlines is formed very quickly in a few seconds or minutes. So, you will have 60% of the drawing ready with the basic forms.

Character Drawing steps

Step 03: Exaggerate the expressions

Once the outlines are ready, try to exaggerate the object pose, features and expressions. For any storyboard, cartoon or comics you work, this will add nice expression and appeal a little fun to the viewers. For drawing, we can show expressions by a little exaggeration only.

Here, I made the object's tummy bigger, large mustaches, flying hair, and the little baby holds her grand father with more careful by holding his head.

Step 04: Draw features of the objects

After finishing the third step, you can start adding features to your object. Features include eyes, nose, mouth, hands and cloths. In a character drawing, this is a common activity. any character will contain these features and most of the times any object that we wanted to characterize, we will add these human features to create expressions.

A complete Time-lapse video demonstration

Step 5: Tweak the Shapes

With the above 4 steps, the character drawing is almost completed. Now, you just have to tweak some key features, erase unnecessary lines to present your character clean and neat. Add any minor shades if required, check the line rhythm and flow.

If the character personality is established. Poses can be attained from different angles.

Now try, any character that you see by and put on your drawing paper. you will be amazed to see it and love it. Creating character drawing makes fun more than creating realist art work.