The Character Designer’s Secret Weapon

There’s an easy tool that’s used by professional artists to help design their cartoon characters, especially when it comes to drawing them in multiple views.  It’s quick, it’s easy, and it guarantees accuracy in lining up features like eyes, noses, ears, and other body parts.

Graph Paper.

It’s easily available in most office supply stores or your neighborhood dollar store.  At pennies a sheet, it’s great for rough sketching and laying out the ideas of your cartoon or comic book character before you go to more expensive sheets of paper, like illustration board.

And Graph Paper can be put to other uses.  You can design cars, buildings, robots, ships, and so on.

Need to design a room?  Plot it out, as a top view, on graph paper.  Each square can represent any measurement, like a cubic inch, foot, or meter.

It’s faster than dragging out a ruler and triangle, and painstakingly measure out lines at precise 90 degree angles.  It’s done for you.

And if you don’t want to waste paper, or feel like going green, you can always go to a digital version like this Photoshop file.  Just Right-Click here (Command-Click for Mac) to download to your desktop.

Here’s how it works:

Do a rough sketch of your character in either a front view, side view, or 3/4 view.  Be sure to leave enough room to draw the character again, but from another view.  The blue lines of the graphs are a guide to drawing approximately where the head lines up, or where the body or feet line up.  You can also maintain a consistent length of the legs, or arms, or face,  as seen from the side, front, and so on.

This is where you explore the look of a cartoon or comic book character.  Draw out different versions.  If the legs or arms don’t look right, draw it again until it does.  With enough practice, you will be able to “eyeball” the length and placement of features without relying on the graph lines.

But it sure helps here and now.

One more tip for users of the Photoshop file.  Open it, and do a File> Save As> and give it a different name.  You want to keep that file separate, so you can reuse it again and again.  Here’s the link again. (Right-click to save to your desktop.)

What do you think?  Leave a comment and share how you’re using this Secret Weapon.