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Drawing the Head
Welcome to drawing the basic cartoon head! The head is one of the most important parts of a cartoon character's body. It's the part that most people first notice when they look at your cartoon. Therefore it's important for your cartoon head to be interesting and unique. Much of this will be achieved through your own personal drawing style, once it's been fully developed. However, you first must learn how to draw the head in the first place! Here we draw the head in frontal view: 1. Draw a circle or oval. Draw a vertical guideline down the center to divide the sides of the face, and a horizontal one about 1/3 of the way down the face, where the eyes will go. Draw another guideline for the nose. Guidelines will help you place the facial features in the right places!
2. Draw two smaller circles within the larger one for eyes. Add dots for pupils. Two more circles on either side of the head make ears. I've used a letter "c"-shape for the nose and a simple line for the mouth.
   3. Add the hair. Mine's composed of deformed triangles, an oval, and a few lines.
4. Trace the drawing with a pen and erase the pencil lines. Be sure to wait until the ink is dry before erasing!
And voila, a basic head, and a rather handsome one at that! You can use these same simple steps to draw a head of nearly any shape and style. Use your imagination and fill up a couple of sketchbook pages of different shapes: circles, squares, triangles, octagons, blobs; then make them into faces. Try different hairstyles. You can get ideas from magazines, or by looking at the people around you. Remember, the more you practice the better you'll become. One thing I like to do is to make cartoon versions of actual people. You can do this from photographs, or by sitting with your sketchbook on a street corner, sketching as people walk by! If you'd like to see an example of some of the different cartoon faces you can make, please To return to the Drawing Lessons main page, click here
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