Learning how to draw cartoons is a great place to start drawing, even if you don’t draw that well or you don’t practice much, anyone can draw cartoons, in fact everything we draw when we are children, is in the cartoon style because we draw in line drawings, even if you only draw stick figures they are still cartoons or simple line drawings, cartoon drawing is not really connected in any way, to your ability to draw realistically, in fact it works better if you don’t, as cartoons are usually meant to be funny.
Success at being able to draw cartoons is not based on your ability to draw accurately, so much as being able to convey a message with a simple line drawing because cartoon drawings are meant to be simple drawings, that can be drawn very easily and quickly by the person drawing them, to convey a message, most often a joke or a funny story but not always.
If you are an aspiring artist wanting to develop your drawing skills, then cartoon drawing is a great place to start practicing your drawing skills but in a more relaxed, lighthearted way and many people start out drawing them, in the beginning because as I have said, all drawings when we are children are in a cartoon style.
There is a basic set of principles to drawing cartoons, that enable the person drawing them to convey a message, that is based on facial expression and body language; people really do look down in the mouth when they are unhappy or the opposite when they are happy.
When the mouth is relaxed it tends to droop in the corners, although the example above is exaggerated, this makes a face look sad but the exact opposite happens when you smile, the corners of the mouth point upward because of the muscles pulling upward, this makes a face look happy.
This knowledge alone gives the artist two very different forms of expression, one that’s happy, one that’s sad, making it easy for others to understand the message being conveyed. The eyes also change shape with different facial expressions, again when sad they tend to droop at the outer corners and when smiling, showing happiness they tend to squint, so that the actual eyeballs can hardly be seen.
The direction of the look also helps to convey some meaning, to the expressions we make in cartoon drawings but if you think about it, we do in real life as well and in written words, like when we are feeling up, we relate that to feeling good or happy, when we are feeling down, we relate that to feeling gloomy or sad.
Using these different symbolic expressions, help to convey different meanings with your cartoons, aiding the creation of different messages or meanings in a visual way.
There are a lot more than just these few examples but it should give you the basic understanding, of how to draw cartoons and how they really work but one thing for sure, none of these drawings are difficult, anyone of you could draw them easily. You probably make these expressions yourself, in your daily life and even use them as expressions in your emails, every time you write them to some one, as cartoon gestures.