How do you speed up cartooning?
Of course you can use a physical timer but how else do you speed up cartooning, and still get a result that you are satisfied with? Because you want to draw a (decent) cartoon every day, but you have time constraints?
What we forget is that cartooning is complex
“Draw a cartoon” describes a process, not just a single task. So to get faster at cartooning we have to speed up on executing all of these tasks:
- having a quirky idea
- finding suitable references
- getting it down as a sketch
- tweaking it till you have something you can outline
- adding colour
My suggestions to speed up cartooning
- keep an ongoing cartoon list and add ideas and/or themes to it every day – so that you can always just choose the next idea and draw it
- keep Pinterest boards of cartoons / animals/ poses/ buildings that interest you – again, so that you have easy access to something you like & can use easily
- speed-sketch one session every week; from tricky references (which you store on… you guessed it… Pinterest!)
- be experimental and take chances with what/how you cartoon — that way things will et more dramatic/ eye-catching over time
- colour a section at a time if you have to, or return to a carton a day later and beef up the colour
- chunk down your goal to just draw a part of a scene a day… micro-scenes are a great way of focusing your attention on one small thing at a time
In time you will also find that you get faster at
~ everything ~
… from taking an idea from simple to quirky, putting a scene together with added drama etc and so on.
But overall, the more you cut the cartooning process to smaller, more concise chunks, the easier it is to spend a small quantity of time focused on just one chunk.
Then you’ll get faster at that particular part of the process.
And you can move on to focusing on the next bottleneck in your cartooning process.