When you’re learning how to draw cartoons, one of the key skills you need to master is how to exaggerate anatomical features in order to achieve a comic or dramatic effect. You can make a character seem heroic by giving them a jutting jaw, or villainous by giving them beady eyebrows, or sexy by exaggerating an hourglass figure. Animation takes this a step further with classic special effects like eyes bugging out to express surprise.

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In order to achieve these types of effects with exaggerated anatomy, it helps to first learn how to draw basic anatomy so you know what to exaggerate. Here is a step by step approach for learning to draw cartoon anatomy, focused on some key features: bodies, faces, and hands.

General Guidelines for Drawing Cartoons

Before we get into specific body parts, here are a few general guidelines to help you with drawing cartoon characters as a whole:

• Know what emotion you want your character to convey, and gear their anatomy towards that. For example, most cartoon bullies are meant to look intimidating, so they are drawn with huge shoulders and small waists to give their upper body a “V” shape, conveying strength.
• Learn to see the shapes in the human and animal figures. Body shapes are generally ovals and cylinders. Facial features include ovals, straight lines, and curved lines. Hands are circles or blocks with cylindrical fingers attached.
• Create emotional effects by exaggerating bodily characteristics, facial features, and gestures.
• Select a single facial or body feature to define your character’s personality, supported by their other features. Popeye has huge forearms, a feature accentuated by his skinny upper arms.

Let’s apply these general guidelines to some specific body parts.

Drawing Bodies

When drawing a cartoon body, the first step is to draw thrust lines which form the most basic lines of the figure and serve as a basis for expansion into stick figures. There are four main thrust lines:

1. The spine, which is a vertical line
2. The hips, which are a horizontal line crossing the spine
3. The shoulders, which are a second horizontal line crossing the spine
4. The legs, which descend from the corners of the hip thrust line in a single diagonal line (when the legs are relatively straight) or a pair of diagonal lines (when the knees are more bent)

After drawing these basic thrust lines you can start to expand them into a stick figure by adding a few ovals. If you’re viewing the figure from the front or back, these ovals are:

1. One oval for the head
2. A longer oval for the torso, which begins the length of the neck down from the head and is about one and one-half heads long
3. A half oval like a basin for the pelvis, slightly separated from the bottom of the torso oval, a head wide and a head long

You then add lines to the shoulder thrust line to indicate the upper arms, and two small circles to the sides of the bottom of the pelvis to indicate where the hip sockets start the tops of the leg lines. The legs are half as tall as the entire body, and slant inwards towards the knees before dividing in half and continuing down to the feet.

When viewed from the side:

• The head becomes a circle for the cranium, attached to an oval for the front of the face extending into the jaw
• The pelvic oval slopes down from the crest of the hip bone towards the front
• The upper arms hang from the bottom point of an inverted triangle connecting the chest to the shoulder blades
• The legs are defined by a straight line

The proportions of this basic stick figure are defined by the length of the head. In traditional drawing, the head serves as a reference to define the scale of the body. The average man is about six and one-half heads tall, but artists typically find it more useful to use eight heads as a guideline. This can vary for kids of different ages, when the body is still developing, or for people with specific body types. Likewise, a different scale is used when drawing animals, depending on the characteristics of the species.

In comic books, most superheroes are drawn eight and three-quarter heads tall to make them appear even taller than normal. In cartoons, you can vary how many heads tall or wide a character is even more dramatically to achieve different effects. For instance, you can make a character appear fat by making them fewer heads tall and using wider ovals for their head, torso, and pelvis. Or you can make a character appear slender by making them more heads tall, using skinnier ovals, and exaggerating the length of their limbs in proportion to their bodies.

Drawing Faces

You can draw a cartoon face by expanding on the oval of the head, using landmarks to define the proportions of the features of the face, and exaggerating those features you want to emphasize.

An anatomically correct head is defined by a circle for the cranium and an oval for the front part of the face that extends down into the jaw. When viewed from the front, the circle of the cranium sits directly behind the oval for the front of the face, making them less visibly distinct. Because of this, frontal views of faces in comic books and cartoons tend to be simplified into modified ovals. In side views the circle and oval are more distinct.

You can define the location and shape of facial features by marking landmarks to segment the face. For instance, to draw an anatomically correct skull from the front:

1. Begin by dividing the oval that defines the front of the face in half, which marks a point around the bridge of the nose, and at three quarters down from the top, which marks the bottom of the cranial circle and the bottom of the cheekbones where the cheeks descend into the jaw.
2. Draw the cranial circle behind this oval with its bottom at the three-quarter line indicated.
3. Draw vertical lines connecting the ends of the half line to the ends of the three-quarter line, to square off a rectangle on the front of the face.
4. Divide this rectangle into five vertical strips of equal width. The middle strip indicates where the nose goes.
5. Split the rectangle in half vertically to draw a horizontal line defining the bottoms of the eye sockets. Draw diagonal lines from the points where this line meets the nose down towards the outer corners of the three-quarters line to define the slope of the cheekbone.
6. Square off the eye sockets by adding a horizontal line just above the half line.

From here there are about ten more steps to complete marking off the eye sockets, cheekbones, jaws, and teeth.

Now these directions are for drawing an anatomically correct skull. Fortunately the cartoon artist doesn’t have to get quite this detailed. But you do need to do know some general anatomical landmarks on the face. Some of the most important things you should know are:

• The distinction between the cranium circle and facial oval, already mentioned.
• The eyebrows are on a line slightly above the line halfway down the face.
• The skull is five eyes wide at eye level, with the eyes separated by an eye width, which forms a central strip containing the nose.
• Vertically, the nose extends from between the eyes to the line three quarters down from the top of the face. Horizontally, the wings of the nose line up with the inside corners of the eyes.
• The tops of the ears line up at about the eyebrows, and the bottoms of the ears line up at about the bottom of the nose.
• Vertically, the line of the mouth is at the center of a circle which has a top at the base of the nose and a bottom in the middle of the chin. Horizontally, the corners of the mouth line up with the centers of the eyes.

These anatomical landmarks define the proportions of a normal face. A cartoon face can exaggerate these proportions. For instance, you can make the forehead bigger to make a character look smart (like Brain from Pinky and the Brain or the Leader from The Incredible Hulk), or make the eyes take up a bigger proportion of the face to create a puppy-eyed or doe-eyed look (often seen in Disney movies and anime), or put tiny ears on a huge wrestler character to make them look like they have cauliflower ears (like the Crusher, battled by the “stragety” of Bugs Bunny).

While we’re on the face, one note on hair: hair should be drawn with thickness, instead of lying flat on top of the head. Draw the hair as a separate layer sitting on top of the cranial oval.

Drawing Hands

Cartoon hands can be drawn as an exaggeration of normal hands. Anatomically correct hands are drawn with a blocky shape for the palm and cylinders for the joints of the fingers. In cartoons, the blocky shape is usually simplified as a circle and the cylinders are simplified into long ovals. Also, cartoon hands are usually drawn with only four fingers, due to the difficulties early animators had with the complexities of drawing anatomically correct hands in time to meet deadlines. Sometimes this is simplified even further by drawing all the fingers together like a mitten.

For proportions, the blocky or round shape representing the palm should be about half the length of the hand, with the fingers forming the second half of the hand’s length. The middle finger forms the peak of an arc describing the tips of each finger, with the pinky reaching a height even with the first knuckle of the fourth finger. The thumb juts out from the base of the palm in two distinct lines at about a 45 degree angle, with the tip lining up just above the line dividing the palm from the fingers, and describing an arc that would sweep just below the second knuckle of the fingers. Study your own hand to help you visualize these directions.

Worthy Cartoon Anatomy Instructions

Chris Hart Books
Drawing Coach
Drawing a Cartoon Face
Drawing Hands

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