Draw Cartoons on Your Computer: Eight Steps from Pencils to Color |

Draw Cartoons on Your Computer: Eight Steps from Pencils to Color

| By Roy Rasmussen | Category: Hobbies

You can draw cartoons on your computer even if you have trouble drawing them on paper. And even if you find it easy to draw cartoons on paper, drawing them on your computer gives you some distinct advantages:

You can use digital references to help you create or even trace your rough sketches.

You can experiment with modifications to your rough sketches without modifying your original image.

You can use digital inking tools to give your tight pencils precision lines and curves.

You can create any range of shading, toning, and special effects with minimal expenditure on equipment.

You can add your own word balloons and coloring.

And you can work in layers to easily achieve effects previously only available at great labor and expense to professional artists and animators.

Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2011

Here are some tools and techniques you can use to draw cartoons on your computer using an eight-step process.

Computer Cartoon Drawing Tools: What You Will Need?

If you want to draw cartoons on your computer, you will need a few vital computer tools:

A means to digitize your rough sketches. There are several ways you can do this:

Draw by hand and use a scanner to digitize your drawings.
Draw directly into the computer using a tablet pen like a Wacom Bamboo.
Draw directly into the computer using a mouse.

You will also need a photo editing program that can edit drawn images. Photoshop is a widely-used standard. If you prefer a freeware option, you might try GIMP or Paint.NET. You can find online lessons, books, and courses teaching you how to use these programs.
You may also want to use specialized software for drawing comics or anime or characters for video games, such as Manga Studio.

Computer Drawing Steps

Drawing cartoons on a computer unfolds through a series of eight steps:

Digitize your rough sketches
Digitally ink your roughs
Shade your inked sketches
Apply screen tones
Add special effects
Add word balloons
Add color
Publish and export your work

Let’s take each step one at a time.

1. Digitize Your Rough Sketches

Start by digitizing your rough sketch. You can draw by hand and then scan it in if that’s easier for you, or you can draw directly into the computer using a tablet pen or mouse. A tablet pen takes some getting used to, but saves a lot of time once you get the hang of it.

If you started with a hand drawing, save your scanned rough as an image file for import into your photo editing program. Then open your photo editing program, import the image, and save it as a new file to preserve your original image file. Your original image file is now the first layer of your digitized drawing.

Working in layers is a big key to successfully drawing cartoons with your computer. A layer is like the digital equivalent of tracing paper. It lets you draw over an image without altering it, or even draw under it if you want to insert something into the background. You can add multiple layers to your drawings to create a variety of effects, and move layers around to see which one you want on top. It is recommended that you create at least one separate layer for each of the remaining steps below, except the last one.

If you drew your drawing directly into your photo editing program, you might choose to break your rough sketch down into several layers. For instance, you could do one layer for a stick figure breakdown of a character, one layer for hair, and one layer for clothing.

2. Digitally Ink Your Roughs

Add a layer to your rough sketch layer or layers for digitally inking your roughs. On this new layer, you can go over your original lines to emphasize the lines you want to keep and polish them up with precision line and curve drawing tools. You can also get rid of lines you don’t want by making your rough sketch layer/s invisible after your inked layer is complete. Your inked layer then becomes the basis for further refinements of your drawing on additional layers.

3. Shade Your Inked Sketches

Next, create another layer to shade your sketches. Use brush tools to add dark areas to your drawing and break up the lighting. You can also use tools to get specialized effects like reflected water, metal, or glass. If you use specialized effects like this, it’s a good idea to create separate layers for them.

At this point you have an essentially complete drawing, but there’s more you can add to polish your work. Some of the next steps are optional if you don’t need certain effects.

4. Apply Screen Tones

If you wish, you can create another layer or layers to apply what is called screen tone. Screen toning is a technique used to decorate backgrounds or other areas of cartoons with repeated patterns such as dots, lines, or cross patterns, creating a look like a screen, hence the name. This greatly improves the design look of the cartoon.

It used to be that screen toning required special screen tone material that was expensive and tedious to apply. With computer drawing programs, it can now be applied cheaply and rapidly.

You can use single screen tone patterns, or impose one tone pattern over another to create your own hybrid tones.

5. Add Special Effects

You can also add layers to add standard cartoon and manga special effects to your drawing. Popular special effects include:

Speed lines, which create a sense of blurred motion up, down, or sideways
Focus lines, which steer the vision towards a central object and create a sense of moving closer or farther from the object
Vanishing point effects
Clouds
Lightning bolts

6. Add Word Balloons

You can also add layers for word balloons. In some programs, you may need to use drawing tools to create the word balloon shapes on one layer, and then add another layer to position text over the balloon shapes. In other programs this process is performed with automated tools that integrate balloons and text.

7. Add Color

Finally, you can add a layer or layers for color. For sophisticated effects, use a separate layer for each color.

8. Publish and Export Your Work

Your drawing is done! You can now publish it in the format of your choosing and export it to other applications to distribute it by print-out, email, Internet, or mobile phone. Send your drawings to your friends, or put them up on Facebook or YouTube to show them off!