The original version of this page collected video lessons on drawing cartoon cats, eyes and faces. The videos are long gone, but the idea was right: you learn cartooning by doing a little every day in a sensible order. Here's that order, using lessons that are free today. Each week has one source to follow and one daily drill.
Week 1 — Lines, shapes and confidence
Follow: Drawabox, Lesson 0 and Lesson 1 (free). It teaches you to draw a straight line, a clean ellipse and a box in perspective, using your whole arm instead of your wrist.
Daily drill: one page of circles and ovals, drawn fast, without erasing. Then turn ten of them into faces by adding only dots for eyes and a line for a mouth. Notice how much expression you get from almost nothing — that's cartooning.
Week 2 — Gesture and the body
Follow: Proko's free gesture drawing videos and practise with Line of Action timed poses (start at 60 seconds, drop to 30).
Daily drill: twenty 30-second stick-figure poses. Not pretty — just the line of action, the tilt of the shoulders and hips. Cartoon bodies are gesture with a costume on.
Week 3 — Characters and expressions
Follow: pick three characters from Cartooning Club How to Draw and copy them step by step. Copying is how every cartoonist learned; Schulz copied Popeye.
Daily drill: draw your own character — two or three simple shapes — showing the same five expressions: happy, sad, angry, surprised, bored. See our how to draw a face lesson for the construction.
Week 4 — Your first comic strip
Follow: the six steps on our cartooning lessons page, and read the first chapter of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics if you can find it at the library.
Daily drill: one four-panel strip a day. Write the joke first, thumbnail it tiny, then draw it at full size. Keep every one. By Sunday you'll have seven strips and a character who's starting to feel like a person.
After week 4
Keep the daily strip habit and add one fundamentals session a week — the drawing techniques page covers inking, shading and line weight, which is where strips start looking professional. And read a lot: our comic strip directory is the syllabus.