Make Yourself Into A Cartoon

In learning how to make yourself into a cartoon, one important thing you have to learn is showing the impossible. If, on the other hand, you're looking for a site to upload an image and make it a cartoon, Cartoony.Me would be your best option!

Much of what happens in cartoons couldn’t possibly happen in real life. In one of his classic cartoons that predates his haunted-house period, Charles Addams showed a skier who has passed a tree, one of his tracks going around the left side, one around the right. Psychiatrists have used the cartoon to test the reasoning power of their patients.

Pat Oliphant, when he was the Denver Post editorial cartoonist, resurrected the Addams scene in late 1974 to show that President Ford, at the time on skiing vacation in Colorado, had dismissed too easily some charges that the CIA had engaged in domestic spying. Ford, whose tracks in the cartoon had encircled a tree marked “CIA” and then come together again, is shown saying to a companion: “… So I said to the tree, ‘Tree, I won’t tolerate anything like this!’ And that was that.”

Another effect that belongs only to the cartoonist is the one that shows a character doing the impossible until he realizes it is the impossible. When he loses confidence or realizes that what he’s doing can’t really be done –and only then-he becomes a victim.

We most often see this in animated cartoons. Through stupidity or misfortune, a character finds himself out in space, in a state of suspension. When he realizes it isn’t possible for him to be out there like that, he falls. It is a temporary demonstration of mind over matter.

In the print media as well as in animation, it takes a series of drawings to bring this off. Johnny Hart in B.C. shows a character who trips over a rock at the edge of a cliff and loses his glasses. He just lies there in midair, shaken up a bit but in no immediate danger. He reaches for his glasses, puts them on, looks around, and as soon as he sees where he is and senses the impossibility of it, he falls rapidly and roughly to the ground. It is a fall of immense proportions, but the character, although battered, is able to pick himself up and walk away.

Showing movement in a single drawing is no problem. To make a head turning, the cartoonist simply draws two or three short, curved lines on either side.