Create A Cartoon Of Yourself : Exaggeration

If you are looking to create a cartoon of yourself and the art of exaggeration, you have come to the right place! One great website to upload a picture and cartoonize it is Cartoony.Me!

What sets the cartoon apart from other art forms is exaggeration. A cartoon screams while an ordinary drawing or painting whispers. The exaggeration involves the idea as well as the drawing. In a gag cartoon in The New Yorker commentary on fast-rising food prices in the mid 1970's, George Price suggested that changes could occur between the moment you threw an item in your shopping cart and the moment you plunked it on the counter in front of the cashier. He showed a grocer with a price stamper in his hand chasing a woman with a full cart who is racing for the checkout stand. The cartoon needed no caption.

Not that cartoonists have a monopoly on exaggeration. Some in the fine arts out-exaggerate the cartoonists. Sculptor Lou Rankin uses exaggeration when he casts animals in concrete for sale by carriage trade houses like Gump's of San Francisco. These pleasantly distorted fine arts pieces bring on the same kind of chuckles cartoonists get with the animals they create.

Surprisingly few serious artists, however, have the facility to produce cartoons. Cartooning requires a talent apart from mere art ability. Drawing is part of it. A sense of design is another part. But most important is an inventive mind.

In drawing a cartoon it is not enough to cross a character's eyes and stick his tongue out. That is strain, not exaggeration. That is the drunk putting on a lampshade at a party. The laughs, when they come, are only polite or embarrassed. The cartoonist is not a showoff. He does not exaggerate for the sake of exaggeration. He exaggerates to make a point or, to use the self conscious language of the photographer, to make a statement.

To show someone walking fast, the cartoonist spreads the person's legs farther apart than normal. The exaggeration often involves some over sizing to call attention to a prop.

The cartoonist wastes his reader's time if he depicts a scene with complete fidelity. If that's what the cartoonist wants, he might better turn the assignment over to an illustrator or photographer.