You might need this in Art class:
* Exaggerate. Cartooning is all about exaggerating - making the features of characters and objects over-emphasised, say someone has a abnormally large head in real life, consider making it the size of a blimp in your cartoon - thats the jist of exaggeration.
* Forget Realism. The beauty of drawing (and cartooning especially) is that you don’t need to focus on realism at all. Want to make one eye 10x bigger than the other? No Problem! Cartoons are sort of an escape from real life so the less realistic the better! (in most cases)
* Your Own Style. You don’t have to draw characters like in the Simpsons, or Family Guy, it’s easier, and usually better to come up with your own style. Once you have your own style you can apply it to all your characters and you’ll find cartooning a quicker and easier process.
* Peoples Opinions. Don’t take one persons opinion of your cartoon, there are a lot of downers that simply don’t like cartoons, find ‘fun’ people that can honestly criticize your work.
* Vault. I read about this in a book once and I thought it was a very nice idea. Basically you look through magazines, catalogues, old photographs etc and store it all in a vault. You collect this media over a period of time and then go back over it to get inspiration for characters and objects. It seriously works, so I suggest you start building up your vault soon.
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Oh will you be my valentine?
