Do You Need Drawing Cartoon Tutorials To Learn To Draw Cartoons?

Drawing  tutorials, cartoon tutorials, drawing cartoon tutorials - these are all extremely popular search phrases on the internet. It seems there are a lot of people who want to learn how to draw cartoons.

Many searches are very specific – how to draw a cartoon cat; how to draw a cartoon face; how to draw a cartoon dragon…  I ask myself what the people searching for these tutorials are actually looking for – what sort of cat, what sort of face, what sort of dragon do they want to know how to draw? And as a cartoonist I wonder how best I could answer their requests.

When I type in these search phrases myself and look at the cartooning sites and tutorials on offer, I see almost always very simple and basic subject renditions – simple enough to draw certainly, and highly colorful, but so basic that I can’t imagine that drawing them would provide much feeling of accomplishment, satisfaction or any advancement of cartoon drawing ability.

I may be wrong of course – this might be precisely what the searchers are looking for – but I always hope they are looking for something more, that they really want to be able to draw cartoons… their own original cartoons of anything and everything.

And then I want to let them know that they don’t need drawing/cartooning tutorials, because cartoon drawing is a very simple process of caricaturizing – and to caricaturize something, you just need to look at a subject and choose the features and characteristics you want to spotlight.

I get the idea that people want a step-by-step, line-by-line instruction for drawing a cartoon – but the most this can teach you is how to draw a particular cartoon in a particular way. The only way to really learn to draw cartoons is to ditch the tutorials and start really “looking” at subjects with your own eyes. The most you should try to get from a tutorial is insight into what a cartoon-drawing is, and the inspiration to just sit down and draw!

Dare to be original, to create your own characters from your own observations – that’s the easiest, quickest and surest way to teach yourself how to draw cartoons.