Cartoon Me Free

In our series of free hubs about cartoons, we discussed everything from ideas, to the different drawing techniques and patterns. Here we will discuss the process. However, if you came here looking for a site in which to cartoon your picture for free, Cartoony.Me would have to be the best!

The born cartoonist draws constantly, not necessarily to produce pieces he can use or save but to register in his mind the quirks of body structure, movement, and expression. He learns to draw rapidly. When the time comes to produce a cartoon for publication, he may, in his haste, ignore what he has learned through observation, putting too many or too few fingers on a hand, for instance; but nobody minds much. What he does try to avoid is making a basic mistake in construction, such as putting the thumb on the wrong side of the hand, easier to do than you might imagine.

Getting it wrong is not peculiar to cartoonists. The writer Louis Nizer is quoted in Grit: When a man points a finger at someone else he should remember that four of his fingers are pointing at himself.” A nice thought, but not probable unless the man is someone drawn by Charles Addams or Vip.

Another writer – for a religious magazine – used a three legged stool as a figure of speech. Shorten one leg, he said, and the stool will wobble. Not so, wrote an alert reader. A four legged stool with one leg shortened will wobble, but not a three legged stool.

For most cartoonists, the idea phase- even for an illustrative cartoon- takes more time than the drawing phase. Once the cartoonist has his message worked out and his composition visualized, he can, depending upon his work practices and drawing style, dash off his drawing in a matter of minutes. For some cartoonists- and for some cartoons- the drawing may take much longer. Rube Goldberg is said to have worked as long as thirty hours on some of those cartoon inventions of his.

Typically, the cartoonist sketches out the cartoon in light pencil lines first, erasing and redrawing: then, when he’s satisfied with the arrangement, he inks in the lines. He works from top left to bottom right to keep his hand off lines that may be slow in drying. But Glenn Bernhardt says, “I’ve never finished a drawing without smearing a pen line.”