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 go 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.

http://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!