Been sending a friend tips for loosening up and drawing people more exaggeratedly / with bolder lines, and I thought I’d make it a public thread for anyone working on that! :

Alex Woo teaches a class on Schoolism all about simplified/caricatured drawing that focuses on story more than copying exactly what you see:
https://www.schoolism.com/lp/gesture-drawing-alex-woo/ It's a really good class - I took it a couple years ago!

He walks through exercises like line of action, silhouette only drawing, and building with BIG basic shapes, which may sound rudimentary, but I learned a lot by watching how he drew and trying to do the figure drawings along with him in real time.

Here's a nice freebie clip from Alex Woo on Youtube:

Here’s another idea for streamlining / simplifying / exaggerating characters: draw with PEN! It allows you to let go of perfection, since we inevitably put a line in the wrong place, but we keep going and it’s ok. Ironically it helps me a LOT to loosen up, be cartoony and bold.

Another tip is: draw anything like 5 times in a row. Figure drawing a 10 min pose? Draw the person 5x instead, 2 min each.

By the fifth time, you don’t really even need to look at them anymore - you’re drawing the IDEA of them you have in your head, which helps you sooooo much to exaggerate them and simplify them.

Also: draw their most prominent feature first! Long legs? Draw the legs first. Big hair? Draw the hair first. Build out from there. You have creative license to change anything you want. Make the other details support that central trait/idea.

Josh Cooley (I think?) posted on his blog about a drawing game he played that is great for this - on his walk to work, he’d look out for someone he wanted to draw. But he wouldn’t actually be able to sit down and draw them until he got to his desk at work....

...so he had to hold the mental image of that person in his head for like 30 min without forgetting why they were interesting. It’s a memory exercise, because you have to size them up quickly, pick like 4 things that your brain can hold on to until you sit down to draw them...

...and so you learn to be FAST at choosing the 4ish most important traits of people in order to remember them as a character. Everything unimportant gets forgotten - and that’s good!

When you sit down, draw the traits you remember, which are the most important/memorable things about them, and fill in the rest of them however you want, changing anything you want, and supporting those 4ish main traits so you strengthen the caricature of the person.

A lot of the time, art teachers try to get us to draw larger, because it helps when studying anatomy and drawing the whole figure. But I think for studying simplification/caricature, it helps a lot to draw SMALL on the page!

Make those traits so bold that they read, even when the character is only an inch tall!

I love drawing how things FEEL, not exactly what they look like in real life.

I guess my #1 advice is to draw things multiple times, and try to PUSH the emphasis further each time. :-) How far can you go before it breaks?

This one broke

I think studying the basics (anatomy, perspective, realism) is the foundation on top of which we build really solid cartooning skills. I recommend not skipping observational studies where you try to copy reality as closely as possible. That’s valuable, too.

(Makes a mental note to do more realistic studies)

My cartooning HERO is Aude Picault Read absolutely everything by her!!

Some more of my fav artists to study: Quentin Blake, Sempé, Blutch, @lbtreiman @AllenOstergar4 @Samstyle @leomatsuda99 Julián Nariño