Gerald the Goat was having too much of an easy time of it, eating all the flowers in the garden…in the neighbour’s garden…..in any garden really…
Time to create a little tension…
Enter the leopard…
That should liven things up a bit and give Gerald something to think about…
Recently I decided to introduce a new character to the Gerald the Goat strip. I’d drawn the snow leopard a couple of times before, but thought it would be fun to include her on a more regular basis.
I wanted to create a bank of different poses that I could choose from when drawing the strip. I draw a lot of cartoons, and so I’m really interested in trying to make the process more efficient whenever I can.
As well as having the different poses to use in the strip, I can also use them to post on social media to promote the strip.
Sometimes if you are illustrating a long article, you may find yourself repeating a character a lot.
If you have to draw the same character again and again, it can become a little repetitive, and that can take the whole fun out of drawing.
In this article I’m going to show how you can use one drawing to easily create a variety of new poses and expressions.
Here’s the leopard as she first appeared:
As you can see, she’s in a walking pose.
I usually save my cartoons as separate layers, so that I easily modify the outline without also having to alter the colour layer.
However, I couldn’t find the separate layers for this pose, and so I started out by creating a new outline.
Here’s the outline. Now to create some other poses based on this one.
I created a new layer on top of the walking pose.
I now drew the legs in a standing position. I drew them in red here so you could see more clearly.
Here are the two poses on top of each other, so that you can see how similar they are.
I’m now going to copy and reuse the standing pose and modify it to create additional ones.
For the yawning pose at the top, I only had to modify the head.
The talking pose at the top right only needed slight alteration.
The “grumbly” pose at the bottom right was the simplest yet.
For the happy pose at the bottom right, I also altered the tail.
It looks like ad additional spot found it’s way into this one…
You can also use the above pose to generate new ones in different positions. You can see above how it was used as the basis of the learning and crouching pose.
I also used it as a reference for a completely new angle of her chewing on the boot.
Build up a bank of characters
You can use this technique to build up a bank of characters that you are refer to again and again. You can also copy and paste the characters into additional cartoons and posts if you want to save time.
Copying by hand
If you are still getting the hang of drawing a character, then I highly recommend copying the character by hand, rather than simply copying and pasting. When you are first starting to develop a character, on eof the trickiest things is getting the character’s appearance consistent from pose-to-pose. Copying by hand is a great way to practice this.
Here’s the leopard again in a completed strip. She’s still in the zoo at this point…but for how much longer?
What’s next?
Next week see the launch of the ‘Storytails - Storytelling for Cartoon Strips Course’. There’s still time to get on the course.
Add your name, best email address, and type ‘story’ in the subject, and I’ll send you further details.
