How to Draw and Paint Crazy Cartoon Characters: Create Original Characters with Lots of Personality

How to Draw and Paint Crazy Cartoon Characters: Create Original Characters with Lots of Personality by Vincent Woodcock

Cartoon characters are leaping out everywhere - from comic book pages, billboards, computer games, and TV screens. Find out how to inject personality into your artwork and create your own fresh and funny characters.

Discover how to simplify, exaggerate, and distort your designs to hilarious effect... bend the rules of anatomy to give your characters funny bones... create madcap expressions and riotous body language.

Experiment with a range of media, from pen and ink to paint and marker, and learn techniques to turn flat cartoons into three-dimensional comic creations, complete with humorous props and backgrounds.

Includes practical information on honing your designs for different markets and professional advice on presenting and selling your finished artwork.

Aspiring cartoon artists, comic book collectors, and nostalgia buffs will discover a happy combination of cartoon history and practical instruction in this color-illustrated book. It teaches art students dozens of ways to simplify, exaggerate, and distort the people, animals, and objects in their illustrations to achieve hilarious effects. An overview of cartoon history showcases humorous characters as they appeared in nineteenth-century satire, in children’s books, in cartoons of the 1920s, in Hollywood animation of the 1940s, and in today’s manga and anime cartoons.

Art students will get tips on making their cartoons interesting with funny props and laughter-evoking backgrounds. Most important are the comic character types that they place in their illustrations’ foregrounds. Here’s how to create stock types—the idiot, the cutie-pie, the comic hero, the evil genius, the loyal sidekick, the straight man, and the heavy. Here, too, are imaginative ways to costume different characters, give them funny poses, and dramatize their emotions through facial expressions, such as fear, anger, boredom, amusement, or surprise. A final chapter advises beginning cartoonists on how to build a portfolio, present their work, create a web site, and find an agent and steady work. More than 300 illustrations.

Book Details:

• Number of Pages: 128
• Book Size: 8-1/2" x 11"
• Book Type: Paperback
• Recommended Ages: 6 and up
• ISBN 10: 0764135732

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This is an excellent "how to" book for kids of all ages. It helps artists reach their own personal cartooning style. Full of tips, shortcuts and more!