Create Comic Characters

This tutorial describes how to create cartoon, comic and manga characters. The guide shows you step by step how to create and draw this characters. You can use the described method to draw comic characters of your friends, or characters from your own imagination.

Create Comic Characters

By drawing, and especially by creating comic characters, it comes down to illustrate all the important characteristics of a figure or a person with just a few strokes. Each comic figure is supposed to be unique, and finally recognizable. If you want to create a comic figure of yourself or of a friend, it is very important to depict all the characteristical facial features or body characteristics in the comic figure. And that's not so easy.

If you want to you can overdo this typical facial features (such as a large nose or big ears) just lika a caricature. This however requires that you allready recognizes this characteristic features and that you are able to depict ist correctly. And as it is a comic figure, you should do that with just a few strokes.

One way do create a comic character is to portray a person from a photo and leave out gradually more and more details while drawing it a few times. It works like this: First you simply portray from the photo - without heeding to the omission of details or to think about creating a comic character.
Then you draw the person again. This time however not from the photo, but from the earlier drawing. It leads you (usually automatically) to leaf out unimportant details and makes you draw the character with fewer strokes. Now you can repeat this step several times, whereby you should always portray from the last drawing. After a few steps you should have been drawing a comic figure which is reduced to the caracteristic features.

The picture below is an example of the gradual development of a comic figure.

Creating comic characters - Progressive creation of a comic character