Hey, these are drawn pretty good for comic ads. I wonder if they were done by an animator. It's someone named Williams.

Here's the Lucky Charms Demon. I have a funny commercial where some roughneck kids manhandle him and debase him bodily.




This Rocky and Bullwinkle one is really nice.

There is a purpose to copying good cartoon drawings: it's not just to be able to make a good copy of something that's already been done.It's to learn the underlying principles and procedures that went into the good drawings you copy.

These are good copies, because they use the same procedure that the original artist did.

If you truly understand the underlying tools of good cartoon drawing, then you should be able to make your own poses using characters you have learned to copy well.

John studied and drew the comics above (and more of my exercise suggestions) and then tried his hand at creating his own poses of the characters:
These tell me that he didn't merely copy by eye. He used his head to figure out how the drawings were achieved. He learned the principles and then applied them to his own creativity.
This I think is missing in cartoon schools, especially when it comes to life drawing classes. The schools encourage you to do certain exercises - like life drawing, but don't encourage you to learn anything from them that you can apply to your own drawings.

Some people are good at copying things that are in front of them, but are lost at making original drawings look good.


John is doing the exact right thing. After you learn something through study and copying, then APPLY what you learned to your own poses. It helps to use characters that you have already learned to draw from the copies, not to design your own - because your own designs may have built in flaws.

Here is a random assortment of Flintstone comics and books drawn by different cartoonists.



Look at Flintstone's eyes. Do you notice what I do? He has 2. Even Rubble has 2 pupils at least.



Everyone has the decency to have 2 eyes.
I'm ok with that.
For most of Flintstone's career he had 2 eyes like most of us, but then....



What's going on here?
Did Space Aliens go back in time to posess Fred's soul and remove his second eye, while leaving both pupils?
2 pupils on one eye! Horrors!
Are these the Space Aliens?






Pebbles looks like she is going through "the change".


Here's a link to some Gene Hazelton comics where you can see different stages of Flintstone's condition emerging.

http://comicrazys.com/index.php?s=hazelton


Something happens to your nose too, as your eyeballs meld.
It seems to shrink.

Christopher sent me one of his studies.He's got the right idea. He's drawing using construction. And some perspective too - which is missing from a lot of people's studies. The sketch has a nice feeling too. My only criticism is the proportions have been evened out. Porky's cranium to muzzle ratio is more exaggerated in the original. His head should be bigger in proportion to his body too.


Here's some good stuff to copy - if you copy it the right way, you can absorb a lot.

Dennis the Menace is very well structured at the top level, with the odd bit of cartoon license and style thrown in to offset it. But you can totally see how the stylish details still wrap around the basic forms. If you copy it, don't start by drawing Turkey lumps, start with the solid forms underneath, and then level by level break the big forms into the next set of sub-forms and look for the patterns and forms within each sub form.

These probably are drawn by Ketcham's "ghosts" a team he trained to draw in his style - his apprentices. They had to be able to draw well in the first place in order to then take on such a unique and thoughtful style.There is an apparent looseness to the finish of these drawings, but don't be fooled by it. The drawings are very well planned at the top level and the final linework has much artistic flair - they aren't sloppy. When you get to the point where you are so confident in your knowledge and skill and style, you then can be looser with your approach and wander off into your own style - but that takes a long time. This knowledgeable looseness can be full of license and lucky accidents if you have a natural flair as some rare cartoonists achieve.

Here are some nice Woody Woodpecker comics - less obviously stylized but still very stylish in a softer way.


These 2 pictures are gorgeous - great skill, and great style and very fun to look at.

This one's getting a bit too stylish, wandering into slight abstraction, but still a good drawing.Just for contrasts' sake here is a later bland version of Woody where everyone is made out of simple flat ovals and circles - a lot stiffer and unnatural and lifeless. I've never been able to figure out why cartooning got so conservative by the 50s.

How could people who actually had all that knowledge just a few short years earlier, willingly abandon it in favor of boring, unfunny, lifeless ultra-conservative blandness? It was downhill even from here.