Drawing Simple Cartoon Characters

So You Want to Learn How to Draw Simple Cartoon Characters?

I've been doing this for years. A lot of years. And honestly, the first time I tried teaching someone to draw a cartoon face, we spent three hours stuck because they kept making the eyes too symmetrical. Like two perfect circles. Which is exactly what they should not be. That's the thing people miss when they start out. Cartoon drawing isn't about making things cute. It's about making choices. Let me walk you through how I actually approach this, starting with the method itself rather than some grand philosophy.

The Core Method Before We Even Talk About Drawing Simple Cartoon Characters

Here's what you need to know first. Every cartoon character is built from basic shapes. That's it. Circle for the head, maybe an oval for the jaw, a few lines for the neck and shoulders. You're not drawing a person yet. You're drawing a construction. Think of it like building a house frame before you put up the drywall. If the frame is crooked, everything else will be too. Start with a circle. Then add a line down the center. This is your face plane guide. Now you can decide if the character is looking straight ahead, turning left, or tilting their head. That one line changes everything about where you place features. I've had students skip this step and end up with faces that look like they're floating off the page. It looks wrong even when they can't explain why. Now for the jaw. A circle alone gives you a neutral, often childlike face. Add a V-shape below it and you get something sharper. An upside-down U shape softens it again. This is where personality starts coming in. A square jaw means stubborn, strong, maybe gruff. A pointed chin reads as clever or mean. The shape of the head and jaw tells the viewer who this person is before you even draw an eye.

About Drawing Simple Cartoon Characters and What Actually Happens

When people hear Drawing Simple Cartoon Characters, they picture quick scribbles on a napkin. And yeah, that's part of it. But the simple part is the result, not the process. Getting a clean, readable character takes real attention to proportion and simplification. You're removing detail, not adding to it. That's harder than it sounds. Let me give you a specific problem I ran into once. I was working on a comic character with a very round, friendly design. Nothing complicated. But whenever I drew him in profile, his nose looked like a bump instead of a nose. It just read as a weird indentation. I spent two days messing with it, trying different approaches. What finally worked was giving his face a slight diamond undertone. Not a full diamond shape, just enough structure under the roundness so the profile had somewhere for the nose to anchor. Turns out, even a "simple" round character needs some underlying geometry to hold up in different poses. I wish someone had told me that earlier. Anyway, the basics of features. Eyes first. In cartoons, eyes are big because they carry emotion. But here's the counter-intuitive part that most beginners miss. The white of the eye matters less than you think. Most cartoon styles barely show the sclera at all. You draw the iris, maybe a tiny highlight, and that's it. The space around the eye does the work. If you shade above and below the eye properly, you don't need to draw a perfect eyeball.

Eyebrows are basically the whole emotion system of a cartoon face. Raise them, drop them, slant them left or right, thicken them or thin them. One pair of eyebrows can make the same character look angry, surprised, sleepy, or suspicious without changing anything else. I always tell people to practice drawing the same face with twelve different brow positions before they move on. It takes twenty minutes and it will change how you draw everything. Mouths are similar. A single curved line can do more than you expect. Upward curve for happy, downward for sad, a flat line for neutral or tense. Add a little detail like teeth or a tongue and you get more personality, but keep it minimal. Too many details in the mouth area make the face look busy and lose that clean cartoon readability.

Practical Steps to Get Started Today

Pick a reference photo or just look at yourself in a mirror. Draw a circle. Add your center line. Decide the jaw shape. Place the eyes along a horizontal line halfway between the top and bottom of the circle. Yes, halfway. Beginners always put them too high. That's what makes characters look childish, which is fine if that's the goal, but usually it's accidental. Draw the eyes as ovals, not circles. Ovals give you direction. They can look up, down, left, right. Circles are stuck looking straight ahead. Add pupils inside, leave a small gap between them for a friendly look or let them touch slightly for a focused expression. Then the nose. A simple dot or a quick L-shape is enough. Most cartoon faces barely need a nose at all. The mouth, a curved line. Done. That's a face. From there you add hair, ears, clothing, whatever fits the character. Hair in cartoons is usually drawn as a solid shape, not individual strands. Think of it like a helmet sitting on the head. Give it a silhouette that reads well from a distance. Same with clothing. Big shapes, clear lines, don't get bogged down in folds and textures unless the style calls for it.

When This Approach Doesn't Work and What to Do Instead

Cartoon drawing like this has real limits. If you're trying to make something that looks semi-realistic, like a comic book hero with defined muscles and detailed costumes, the basic shape method alone won't cut it. You'd need to layer in anatomy study, shading techniques, and probably a lot more practice. This approach is built for stylized, simplified characters where readability beats realism. Another failure case is when you try to draw characters from imagination without any reference. It sounds obvious, but a lot of people skip straight to drawing from their head and end up with generic faces that all look the same. Keep a folder of reference images. Faces, hairstyles, body types, expressions. Even professional artists use references constantly. It's not cheating, it's research. If you find yourself stuck on proportion, try flipping your drawing horizontally. Most drawing tablets have a mirror function. Or hold the paper up to a mirror. Flipping the image shows you mistakes your brain has been ignoring. I use this technique almost every time I draw anything, even years into doing this.

There are good free resources out there for this. YouTube channels like Proko and SynGraphia break down cartoon and character fundamentals pretty well. Their older videos might have lower quality, but the content is solid. There's also a community over at SketchDaily on Reddit where people post progress and get constructive feedback. Nothing beats seeing other people's attempts and understanding where the common traps are. Practice schedule that actually works. Draw ten faces a day. Not ten complete characters, just faces. Different ages, different shapes, different expressions. Speed doesn't matter at first. Accuracy and observation do. After two weeks of this, your hand will start knowing where things go without you having to think about it. That's when you can add bodies and start pulling full characters together. One last thing. Don't copy other artists' styles blindly. Copy the structures they use. Notice how they simplify a hand into two or three shapes instead of drawing every finger. Watch how they use negative space to define features. Understanding the why behind the style matters more than reproducing the look exactly. Styles change. The principles don't.