Creating a Cartoon

I think sometimes it’s interest to show a behind-the-scenes on some projects. First it shows the serious thought goes into these fun projects and demonstrates techniques and principles that you may be able to use in your own work.

So, this is the cartoon I recently completed for Flipswap. Flipswap is a company that handles e-waste by giving you store credit (or cash) for your used cell phone. Their marketing visuals are always fresh and unique—this gives me a great opportunity to make things like the following cartoon (which is used in the company’s training tutorial).

Get a Concept

First, you should have a concept in mind—this is probably the most important thing to make a clever or funny comic. Even copy for the dialog would be nice so you can plan out your “shots” and roughly place word bubbles when doing sketches. Not only will it help you develop it faster, you’ll also have inspiration for drawing expressions on your characters faces (or even who the characters might be in my case).

Finding the Acting Talent

I started by developing my actors outside the confines of my four frames. The jovial, heavy-set nice guy is where I started. First, by sketching what I wanted, I roughed out a basic look for my guy and took a snapshot with my iPhone. Using the blurry picture as my guide I used the pen tool to created the basic overlapping shapes that outline his body and face. You can see by the “x-ray” (right) how I made my shapes. I only created his upper half because I figured he’d be behind a desk and we’d never need to see his feet anyway.

After some updates the cartoon later, we settled on a slightly more fit character without a pig-tail-nose, but the same structure is there. The beauty of working in Illustrator (rather than with paper or Photoshop) is that it affords perfect resolution independence and good-looking squashing and stretching if needed.

For my lanky customer character, I did exactly the same thing only created his entire body.

Bringing these guys to life and recreating the hand-drawn look was probably the most fun and easiest part. This is done by simply adding a brush stroke to the edges of the objects and being cognizant of their relative stacking order. For instance, the head shape should be above the neck shape—pretty straight forward. After that, choosing colors to compliment the bright colors of the Flipswap brand was the next step.

You’ll notice in many “real” cartoons that the artist uses bright colors for foreground elements and dull, desaturated colors for background ones. Not only that, but shapes in the foreground are almost always stroked with black and in the background they are stroked with a color. This is a trick that proves pretty effective of communicating what is in the foreground and what’s in the background. You don’t see too much of this in my cartoon, but the first frame is an example of this.

Over the Shoulder

You’ll notice in frames 2 & 3 that we’re looking over the shoulder of a character. This is a technique used by comic book artists that allows us to see both characters at once. Think of this as a scene in a movie and we have the problem of trying to capture dialog between two actors. We don’t want to place them side-by-side all the time, and we definitely want to make it visually appealing with depth-of-field and perspective. The over shoulder perspective is one solution to the problem and accomplishes all these goals.

To accomplish this, I filled my character with a single dark color. This serves to separate him from the action to the front of him and create a distinct outline. Since I have already drawn my characters from the front view, this works perfectly.

So, take these tips and try it out for yourself in a future project—I guarantee you’ll have fun.