Want to Look Cute? Draw Yourself!

Is Tanuki saying I have a big head?

Drawing yourself can be easy and fun

Even if you’re not a cartoonist, knowing how to draw yourself as a cartoon character can be a unique addition to your journals, putting your face on little notes or cards you give as gifts to friends, family, and even your kids.

You can add personality to anything you’re writing by hand and make people smile if you can draw yourself quickly and cutely.

Step One: Pick a shape for your head

Choose a shape for your head. Even a square one could be cute!

Look in the mirror, take a deep breath, and be honest about your head shape. Do you have a long face? Round? Maybe you’re not sure, so you ask someone. If you have kids, ask them how they see you. Be prepared for hilarious honesty!

Truthfully, the shape of the head doesn’t really matter.

You can use any of the three. I draw myself with each one of these head shapes depending on how I feel. If you look back on some of my older posts, the cartoony version changes depending on the joke, how stubborn I want to come across (square heads are good for that), or how innocent I must look to clarify the message.

Step Two: Draw your eyes and nose along the same line

Drawing your eyes and nose on the same line helps you look cute.

I like to use simple dots for my eyes, but you can use circles with pupils inside if you like. The main tip is to keep the eyes level with the nose. For some reason, this helps your drawing of the face look young and cute.

If you move the nose down further, it will make the face look older. If you have a pencil or pen in hand, try it. Draw several head shapes and add a simple letter C-shaped nose, then place eyes higher or lower and see what happens.

The key to making it look like you can also be adding eyebrows. Are yours thick, thin, or bushy? Dark or light color?

Be honest!

I have thick dark eyebrows, so I draw them large and color them black. They’re so big that they rise above my head most of the time. Don’t be afraid to push the size of your facial features. Making your eyes and nose super tiny in the center of a large circle might look better than features that take up more space. Use variety until you get something that looks right.

Even an expression can convey your unique personality.

If you’re a smiley person, really push the toothy grin. Are you usually serious? Try out different versions of expressions that represent you until something clicks.

Step Three: Add ears and hair

Now, they look like people!

Hair can make all the difference. Being bald is undoubtedly a part of making the cartoon version of me look accurate.

What shapes are created with your hair? How do you wear it most of the time?

Is it up, down, curly on top? If you always wear a baseball cap or some other cool hat, like a fedora, put it on you. See if you can figure out a style that looks like the every day you and simplify it into a few curving lines.

You don’t need to look exactly like you—only resemble you.

Step Four: Add a midsection, then arms and legs

One of these just might be you.

Are you tall or short? Maybe your midsection should be broad or box-like. Once you get it more like you, add in legs and feet. Don’t be afraid to use the animation method of Squash and Stretch to pull yourself long if you’re tall and smoosh yourself shorter or wider if needed.

Keep your feet simple ovals or half circles to make drawing easier.

That middle guy looks more like me.

Add arms with two parallel straight or curved lines and place a circle at the end for the palm of your hand.

Later, you can add a thumb and little sausages for your fingers.

From here, try adding details to your clothes that look like what you would typically wear. If you’re using a pen, coloring something in black, like pants, a collar, or a shirt, adds visual interest to your drawing.

Check out these examples.

I like the pointy-haired guy. He looks like a muppet!

Will you look like a kid? Yes. Most likely. But you’ll be cute and easy to draw.

For practice, try drawing your friends simply or family members and see if you can capture them with dots, circles, and different body types. You’ve seen me draw my daughter several times in comics here, and I focus on her curly hair to make her distinct.

Make sure to try various versions of yourself and have fun. If you make something you like, let me know in the comments.

Happy drawing!

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How to Get New Ideas

Here are some brainstorming techniques that help get my creative juices flowing.

New ideas can be fun, but that doesn’t mean they’re good. © Khalid Birdsong

Mastering getting creative work done is one thing, but what happens if you don’t even know where to start?

Coming up with new ideas can be challenging.

Most people don’t have a magical Japanese Tanuki raccoon by their side to help them brainstorm. Fear not. You can always find inspiration in the world around you, the books you read, the shows you watch, and even in discussing current events with friends. When you expect to be inspired, you’ll look for exciting themes and discover ideas around you.

Okay, maybe it’s not that easy. Here are a couple of techniques I use to get inspired.

Free association can be a fun way to spill everything in your head and make connections by writing words and sketching them out in your notes.

Free association in psychology refers to a process of discovering your genuine thoughts, memories, and feelings by freely sharing all the seemingly random thoughts that pass through your mind. Usually, you are given a prompt like a word or image without context then, you say what it makes you think of. The person leading the exercise tries to create links between the prompt and your response to learn about how your brain makes connections between ideas.

Sigmund Freud was the first pioneer of the psychoanalysis technique of free association. Freud worked on developing this technique further between 1892 and 1898. This new method became a cornerstone of psychoanalytic therapy. Freud based free association on the theory of psychic determinism that informed all his work.

-Better Help

My way of doing this involves sitting down at my drafting table, staring at the wall, and writing down whatever comes into my head—even if it’s unrelated. For a project where I already have characters, like my Fried Chicken and Sushi comic strip, I might have one character in mind, like J, and throw out words that come to me when I think of him.

Some people say it’s crazy, but I also like asking my characters what they want to do next. I’ll often start sketching them in various poses, doing different things like cooking, playing sports, or dancing. Eventually, they answer me, and new ideas for strips emerge, sometimes quickly, after a lot of random writing and drawing.

If you’re trying to write a new story idea from scratch, you could pick a word for something you’re interested in, like football. Write down all the words that come to your mind to describe the game of football and what it means to you.

Can you create a character that wants to play football but can’t, or they only focus on becoming the best player in the world and neglects other essential parts of life?

Like Tanuki stated in the comic above, combining random ideas is fun, but a story is only interesting as long as there’s conflict.

This leads me to my next point.

Add opposites for conflict and contrast.

Anywhere you can put a character with an opposite personality to another, something that feels opposed to everything in the world you create, or an opposing view to the points in an article you write is compelling and will create even more ideas.

I’m still working on getting better at this, but whenever I’m stuck on an idea, whether writing or drawing, I go back to opposites.

Take two things you’re interested in and add something opposite.

Why? Putting two things together is easy but doesn’t make a story. Adding an opposite element to your idea gives natural conflict and possibilities to electrify your new project.

I made this comic by using the brainstorming technique with Tanuki above. © Khalid Birdsong

For example, say you’re interested in writing a fantasy short story. You think firefighters are incredible, and you love magic. Firefighters put out fires. The opposite could be a firefighter who starts fires. Or one who can start fires with magic. Is he doing it to give firefighters something to do? Is he crazy? Does he want to watch the world burn? In what kind of world are they living?

You see, just these three elements have me exploring questions and figuring out a world. Coming up with ideas isn’t as difficult as you might think. I bet you can create impressive new concepts with the above methods. The challenge is deciding which ideas are the best for you to take seriously and then start working on them regularly.

Choosing ideas to commit to long-term is a challenge we can discuss in a future post.

Stay tuned.

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