Aspiring cartoon artists, comic book collectors, and nostalgia
buffs will discover a happy combination of cartoon history and
practical instruction in this color-illustrated book. It teaches art
students dozens of ways to simplify, exaggerate, and distort the
people, animals, and objects in their illustrations to achieve
hilarious effects.
An overview of cartoon history showcases humorous
characters as they appeared in nineteenth-century satire, in children’s
books, in cartoons of the 1920s, in Hollywood animation of the 1940s,
and in today’s manga and anime cartoons.
The
author shows how to create cartoons using a wide range of media, from
pen and ink to paint and pixels. Art students will get tips on making
their cartoons interesting with funny props and laughter-evoking
backgrounds.
Most important are the comic
character types that they place in their illustrations’ foregrounds.
Here’s how to create stock types—the idiot, the cutie-pie, the comic
hero, the evil genius, the loyal sidekick, the straight man, and the
heavy. Here, too, are imaginative ways to costume different characters,
give them funny poses, and dramatize their emotions through facial
expressions, such as fear, anger, boredom, amusement, or surprise. A
final chapter advises beginning cartoonists on how to build a
portfolio, present their work, create a web site, and find an agent and
steady work. More than 300 illustrations.
By Vincent Woodcock
128 pages