It’s up to you if you give your cartoon character a body, or just a head and shoulders. As we have drawn a 2D cartoon, that everybody knows is not completely realistic, I don’t think it matters if you give your character an out-of-proportion body.
You could give him or her a smaller body if you haven’t got much room. If I were you I would draw a stick man body for him. It is amazing what you can do with stick men if you think about it first!
How to draw a good stick man
- Don’t give him an extra long neck
- Make his body about the same size as his legs, or maybe a bit longer
- This isn’t realistic, but it will help you show movement and actions with your figure
- Make his stretched out arms about as long as his body
- Stick men don’t necessarily need features or hands and feet
- Sometimes it is best to keep things simple and try and get the movement right
Remember that arms are about expression and legs are about balance.
- If we want to show feeling towards someone we might lean towards them, or away from them.
- We can do a lot with our arms, we can stretch them out wide, fold them in our laps, cross our arms, put our hands on our hips, raise one arm in the air, scratch our heads, chew our fingers, the list goes on…
- You can show all of these things with stick figures
- When we make a movement with our arms or upper body, we use our legs to stop us from falling over.
- Legs can stand in a neutral position, which is shoulder length apart. Legs will often be positioned in this way if we are standing still – it looks relaxed.
- Legs can be close together, with heels touching, this pushes our spine up and makes us seem more alert – like the way soldiers stand to attention.
- Legs can bend. We can bend one or both legs or go down on one knee.
- We can throw one leg out to the left or to the right while keeping the other neutral – we often do this to balance out the top half of our bodies.
- We can use our legs to move, to walk, jump, hop and run.
For older readers
Balance: the human body is a complicated system of weights and balances. Our skeleton is finely balanced so that when we need to move one part of our body, we can adjust our skeleton by moving another part of our body to help stop us from falling over.
Often when one side of the body goes up, the other side goes down. You can think of it like a set of scales.
Talk about it!
You can look at sports pictures in a newspaper to get an idea of how this works.
Sportsman often move at high speeds and their bodies move in all sorts of complicated ways and contortions, but they still don’t often fall over. That is because their bodies automatically adjust to help balance them out as they are moving.
Athletes might have to train their bodies to respond in this way over many years if they are asking their bodies to perform a movement that is unusual, but everybody’s skeleton responds this way in real life situations.
It is more noticeable when looking at sports photographs because in Athletics and in other Sports, movements are often more exaggerated.
Doodle it!
Try drawing a stick man performing some everyday actions. Try and think of his body as a spine and keep a fluid line. Try and position his legs in the right way to help balance him out.
Well Done!
Well done, that’s brilliant!
Tomorrow we will see if we can finish your book off by drawing a simple stick man comic strip on the white pages, or using pictures of stick men and other meaningful objects to fill in the white margin around your text.
