Now that it’s all back to normal, it was really nice to see the great traffic coming to HowToDrawA.net, without any new post. Thank you readers! It was really great to see that escalating traffic graph :)

So, enough with the talking – let’s start the drawing!

In this post I’ll show you how to draw a very very simple electric guitar drawing. I selected the guitar that Steve Vai is playing – Ibanez Jem505. My husband loves his music. I love the shape of his guitar.

I’m going to show how to draw Steve Vai’s electric guitar in the step by step method, based on the actual picture of the guitar. You can practice by placing a thin white paper over a guitar picture, and do the same as I will show in this tutorial. You can also print the exact guitar I’m using.

1. Start by drawing the main parts, which are the easiest as well – I look at the guitar and see just a rectangle (the guitar neck) and a ’roundy’ shaped guitar body. That’s why I started by going over these parts, whilte the body itself was divided to 2 circle-like parts:

2.  Once we’re done with the easy part, let’s go over the other significant parts of the guitar, which are slightly more difficult to draw.

• Go over the outlines, without getting into details. First focus on getting a shape which is close enough to the final image you’re trying to achieve, and then add the extra details.

3. Now we have the main outline of the guitar. Remove the guitar image – from this point and on it’s no longer Steve’s guitar, but your guitar, and you can do with it whatever you want! Add the final details – In this case I simply forgot to draw the sides of the guitar body when drawing the outline, so I just added it on this point. It turned out to be with a similar shape to the original one, but not exactly the same. That’s what ‘creativity’ is all about (well, it’s a great excuse fot a not-so-much-alike drawing…)

4. You can get into details as much as you’d like. I want my guitar simple, without too many details. I just added a few extra details, and painted it red. It’s different from the original, but I like it this way  :)

The simple trick which I’m about to show not only answer the above questions, but will actually help you come up with some nice final cartoons!

What do you need:

- magazine

- white paper (should be slightly transparent)

- pencil

The trick origins:

I’ve seen my mom does this hundreds of times: When she’s bored she takes a newspaper, chooses an image within it, and

simply goes over the face outlines -- the eyes, mouth, chin, etc. Many times she adds some ‘extras’ -- Obama receives a pony tail, Hilary got herself a new mustache…

As a little girl, I found myself imitating my mom by doing the same: taking a newspaper, picking an image and going over the lines to create my own funny image. I Now realize that this very simple thing we were doing was a wonderful exercise in cartoon face drawings!

Improve your face drawing skills:

Pick a nice photo in the magazine. Put the white paper over the photo, and make  sure you still see the picture through it. If not, you’ll probably wanna use a thinner paper.

• To see thorough a thick paper, you can put the paper and magazine against a window glass (when there’s still light outside…). The light will go through the magazine and the paper, and so you’ll see the picture though the white paper.

Draw the magazine picture’s outlines on the white paper - face, eyes, mouth, ears, chin… and there you have it -- a simple doodly face. Now that you have a great base of a face you can leave the magazine and make the outlines you just drew into a cartoon face by adding hair and everything you think is needed.

Video example:

In this quick doodling video I chose a ‘Cosmopolitan’ magazine cover, since it simply has nice girl images. I’ve used this trick for a computerized doodling, but this can easily be implied on any real life paper and magazine.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I6yIOs-Tls

I call this trick ‘The cosmopolitan’, since it requires a nice magazine with a quality image on it. However, every magazine and newspaper,  and actually any picture, will do for this trick.

Good luck!