Cartoon yourself easy for fun, easy to draw people.

• Cartoon yourself like a real cartoonist.
• Simple tricks to show you how.
• Simple ways that have been used by cartoonists for years.
• Following the instructions on this page will make it easy.

Cartoonists have used these ways since the very beginning, cartoonists have always used tracing as a way of working with cartoons, nearly all of the cartoon movies you see on television have been created through tracing. The only ones that haven't are the ones that have been created in the last 10 maybe 20 years because nowadays they do them with a machine called a computer.

Today they don't even draw cartoons hardly at all because the computer does most of the work for them.

Cartoon yourself the easiest way with a computer but you won't need any of the expensive software they use or any tools, like they do in the cartoon studios, you won't need to use any of those cartoonize yourself web sites either. It is easy to do real cartoons of yourself and have lots of fun doing it, plus learning about drawing at the same time, how cool is that?

As seen in the video above this is very easy and you can see the basic cartoon images below.

The first thing you need is some photographs of your self on the computer, this shouldn't be hard as we all use digital cameras nowadays so have most of our pictures on computer anyway. Then choose a picture that you want to use for your cartoon and open it up as a preview in the picture viewer on your computer. Doing this helps to make it bigger or smaller so you can get it to the right size that you want.

Then you need a piece of printing paper, the type you use at home for the printer and place it on the computer screen over the picture of yourself. You will notice that you can see the picture through the paper because of the light being emitted by your computer screen, which projects the image through the paper. This is now like using a light box, which is a tool artists and cartoonists have used for years, up until the computer was invented. A light box was just a flat box with a piece of glass over the top and some lights inside it and worked the same way as doing this with your computer screen.

Now trace all the outlines with a pencil by drawing over the image you can see through the paper so as to create your outline or what is called your construction drawing and you will have the bases for you to draw yourself as a cartoon. Take this traced drawing off your computer screen and then draw over the pencil line with a black pen, it doesn't have to be black it can be any colour you like. You could try out different colours if you want because it would be easy to just trace another one if you didn't like it. Then you could leave it as just a black and white cartoon of yourself or a coloured cartoon outline or you could colour it in completely with other colours.

If you have children this is a great way for you to create cartoons for your children to colour in as children love colouring pictures. You could then rephotograph these cartoons you have made and print out as many as you like and have hours of endless fun experimenting with them. You can as I have done below, make cartoons of people you like that are celebrities or anything. Cartoon drawings of yourself or you friends is easy and great fun, if you follow what I will show you below on the rest of this web page.

Below you will see a picture of Justin Bieber, it has been traced from my computer monitor with a graphite pencil. Be careful if you are doing this not to press hard on your pencil because quite often, modern monitors are not covered with glass so they are quite soft. If you press too hard on a soft screen monitor you might damage it.

• Soft graphite pencil, 2B, 3B.
• Ordinary A4 printing paper, the type you get at home.
• Black ink pen or felt tipped pen
• Colored felt tipped pens if you want to do color
• Something to hold your paper on the screen I use Blue Tack

If you do what has been shown on this page you will be able to cartoon yourself or make cartoons of just about anything.

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Thank you again, Gareth Pritchard.