Every cartoonist in this directory started with a bad drawing of a circle. Cartooning isn't about drawing well; it's about drawing clearly and being funny on purpose. Here's the whole craft in six steps, then the free resources that will take you the rest of the way.
- 📆 Cartoonist Drawing Lessons — a free four-week starter course
- 🖋️ Drawing Techniques — construction, line weight, inking, shading
- 🙂 How to Draw a Face — seven steps, then every expression
1. Build characters from simple shapes
Charlie Brown is a circle. Garfield is a fat oval with ears. Dilbert is a rectangle with a tie that won't behave. Start every character as two or three basic shapes and only add detail once the silhouette is recognizable — if you can tell who it is from a black shadow, you've designed a cartoon character.
2. Master five expressions
Draw the same face happy, sad, angry, surprised and bored. You'll discover that the eyebrows and mouth do almost all the work; the eyes just need to be big enough to read from across the room. Once you can flip between those five, you can act.
3. Exaggerate, then exaggerate more
Cartooning is caricature, not portraiture. A tall character should be absurdly tall; a surprised character's eyes should leave their head. Push every pose further than feels comfortable, then push it ten percent more. Calvin's dad doesn't merely frown — he looms.
4. Write the gag before you draw it
The classic strip is four panels: setup, build, build, punchline. Write it as dialogue on scrap paper first and read it aloud. If the joke doesn't work in words, drawing won't rescue it. Single-panel cartoonists do the same thing in reverse — caption first, picture that makes the caption funny second. (See our funny cartoons page for the masters of that form.)
5. Letter and balloon it properly
Write the words before drawing the balloon around them — the number one rookie mistake is a beautiful balloon with dialogue crammed inside it. Use capitals, keep lines short, and place balloons so the eye moves left to right, top to bottom, hitting the punchline last.
6. Draw one strip a day
Schulz drew nearly 18,000 Peanuts strips. Nobody is good at strip 1; everybody is decent by strip 100. Keep every strip you make, date it, and look back a month later. The improvement will be obvious and slightly embarrassing, which is exactly right.