If you’re sort of new to drawing and want to draw your favorite characters or want to practice so you can draw characters of your own, you’ve came to the right place. The first thing to remember before we start with this tutorial is to remember that drawing is a skill. And like any skill, practice is important to get better at what you want to do. For this tutorial, I’ll draw Happy Higgenbottom from Nickelodeon’s The Mighty B.
The first thing you must do is get as many useful references of the character you want to draw. The number of references depends on how much of the character you want to draw and how accurate you want to be to the source material and how much of the character you want to draw. Usually, people will work with a character reference sheet but this single image will do for right now.
The second thing you should do is break down the character to their most basic shapes. When it comes to drawing, newcomers always want to get to the end result because that’s all we see in a finished art piece. Every art piece starts with fundamental shapes and forms and every character can be broken down to various shapes, and depending on how dynamic you want to go with the poses, you can turn the 2D shapes into 3D forms if you have an understanding of perspective.
The Third thing to do is measuring the proportions of the character. Breaking down the character you want is great but getting the proportions right is critical when it comes to staying on model and also helps people recognize the character by the silhouette. When drawing human realistic human height, the average mesurement for an adult is 7 heads tall from head-to-tow and the length of the shoulders are three heads apart. However, not all characters follow this anatomy but measuring the character’s height by their heads and following the traditional landmarks of the human anatomy, you should be ready for your next step.
The fourth thing is line art. This stage is laying down confident contour lines for your character. You can try to emulate the line art of your source material or you can take liberties with it. At this point, people will recognize who the character is because you’ve gotten through the heavy lifting of emulating the anatomy of the character.
The fifth is coloring. This should be the easiest part because the the colors are already laid out for you. If your you’re drawing digitally, you can use the eye-drop tool or if you’re drawing traditionally, you can use colors you think is closest to the reference material.
And there you have it! If you want to try it out, feel free to share what you were able to make with the tutorial!
Exploring Visual Arts 