Turn Yourself Into a Cartoon

If you want to learn how to turn yourself into a cartoon, read along to learn about the magic of drawing art! One great website in which you could do this however, is that of Cartoony.Me!

All art-and especially cartoon art-is illusion. Like the magician on stage, the artist who calls himself a cartoonist titillates his audience with his repertoire of visual effects. There are many types of effects they use.

One is the Cliché. Clichés abound in the cartoonist’s world. He uses them shamelessly: the Zs that indicate sleep; the scrambled letters and punctuation marks that stand for cursing; the light bulb that says “idea”; the puffs of smoke that follow someone on the move; the sweat marks or tears to help show pain, worry, sadness, and even mirth.

See how easy it is, using cartoonists’ clichés, to suggest drunkenness or near-drunkenness. Bubbles coming out of the mouth of one man, his necktie undone; eyes crossed on another man; eyes half closed on a third. The fact that one of the men is leaning precariously helps, too. Sometimes, cartoonists make fun of the clichés they depend upon. Charles Addams in a New Yorker cartoon shows a monk, a scribe, asleep at his post, pen in hand, his head resting on the manuscript he’s been working on. He’s obviously asleep. But that is no ordinary Z above his head. The Z is one of those fancy illuminated initial letters we associate with the literature of the Middle Ages. More recently, in a New Yorker cartoon, Nurit Karlin, using three panels, shows a day-dreaming character walking along a New York street thinking about an exotic island. In the last panel to his chagrin, the balloon is hung up on one of those arrow street signs, caught and apparently punctured as the character walked by.

The cartoonist uses the simplest possible devices to depict the most complicated of scenes. For instance, to show a large flock of birds flying, all he needs is a series of stretched-out Ms, preferably made with slightly curved lines.

Cartoonists’ shortcuts have come in for some kidding, too. Steve Allen in his Bigger Than a Breadbox, offers a four panel gag cartoon of a hunter watching a flock of geese or fucks, the hunter shoots, he makes his hit, and runs to retrieve it, and, in the last panel, surprised and disappointed, he holds up for us to see- two slightly limp Ms.