How to draw any cartoon character: line drawing

Watch this tutorial to learn how to draw any cartoon character: line drawing. Make sure to pause the video after each step and look at the screen every few seconds while you are drawing.

"In this video I am going to share a very effective training technique that I use in my classroom. It is a strategy tailored for novice artists and it will make you better at drawing what you see (also known as the skill of rendering). I call this process mass drawing / line drawing. The process will seem awkward at first, but I have seen students get great results once they understand the process. So please give it a chance. All that you will need is a highlighter, a pencil and some paper. Lets begin.

This is a mass drawing. I used the highlighter to make a silhouette of the cartoon character, Ni Hao Kai Lan. I scribbled it in quickly and as a single mass. This will serve as a guide for the second step, the line drawing.

This is a line drawing. Notice that it is done directly over the mass drawing. But don't just outline; make corrections. The mass drawing will enable you to see the big picture and the mistakes that you made. Many of my students have found it much easier than guessing on a blank sheet of paper. So dont outline your mass drawing make corrections while doing the line drawing.

Take a second to look at how many changes I made to the original mass, such as the right arm, the shoes and the hair."

--Merrill Kazanjian

Check out further detailed instructions in the description at the original video.