When I was a child my Mum used to watch a TV program called “Cooking with Wootty”. Wootty was a slim, nondescript fellow with big horn-rimmed glasses and a haircut like a Beatle. The ‘everyman’ of the 1970’s, I reckon!
Mum owned a slew of recipe books — as well as being an accomplished cook already — so why on earth did she watch what Wootty got up to on his show most weeks?
Pretty simple really — she “just wanted to see how he did things”
And it’s a bit the same when you dive into cartooning. Making a practice of collecting cartoon ideas wherever you see them, and also copying those ideas as they are (even if they are relatively different from whatever you have in mind for your own work, expands your drawing skills and also feeds your imagination.
And those two things go hand in hand
You need to keep honing your technical drawing skills so that you can cartoon accurately and quickly. The faster you can draw, the easier it is to churn out an idea. And the more ideas you work with, the more your own new, fresh ideas will well up inside you.
As Maya Angelou said, ““You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
So in the spirit of copying, creating and coming up with new ideas, here’s a video tutorial to walk you through how to draw Kyle from South Park.
Never heard of Kyle, or watched the South Park?
Neither have I! That’s exactly what I mean by “Find cartoon references everywhere you look”.
A client drew another South Park character and I couldn’t resist finding more so that I could ‘decode’ the overlapping shapes I could see within it.
You know by now what a huge fan I am of drawing with overlapping, circle-y circles 😄. This made my fingers itch for a pencil and paper…
Anyhow, it’s your turn now. Here he is…
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