How to cartoonize a face - Step by step Tutorial for beginners

cartoonizing a picture is just kinda making it cute in a baby-like way.

Of course there are many ways to do so, I'am just showing you how I usually do it. you may follow other methods or even invent your own style in cartoonizing faces.

You can watch the tutorial video here

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Basic directives:
What we do is that we basically change the facial structure to match the shape of a baby face while keeping as many details as possible from the original picture.

first thing to make the head way bigger than the rest of the body.

The forhead should also be very big just like in babies faces, it should at least occupy half of the face or even more

the eyes and eyebrows should be bigger too but try to keep similarities with the reference like the look, eyelashes, color.. or anything that would help your cartoon character look like the original figure.

the nose and mouth are smaller than the original but they have the same shape and same details

actually for the mouth it's better if you make it smaller from the sides but keep the same lip thickness, just like the picture below:

but don't exagerate too much either, try to find that sweet spot where the mouth looks the same but smaller and cuter.

Last thing to concider is that copying the exact clothing items, colors and accessories.. would help you to get your drawing to look more like the original picture, in my case there's only the necklace. But again this is just a demonstration, I won't be paying too much attention to the details but you can.

We start by drawing the shape of the face, which could be a circle or an ellipse, it's all up to you, then we draw a horizontal line in the middle of it to define where the eyes would be and a vertical line for the center of the face.

Use a lighter pencil because those are guidelines that will be deleted later. And also in case you made a mistake and need to erase and redraw.

Now let's proceed to drawing the eyes. there are many tutorials about how to draw manga eyes, I'm even thinking about making one myself. Like I said, eyes are big compared to how they would be for real humans.

then we move to the nose who is very small with the same shape.

Once You are done with the guidelines just delete them and see how your drawing looks so far. If everything looks ok, proceed to adding more details, like the rims of the eyes, the eyebrows and the visible part of her right ear...

Then start drawing the little mouth. And by the way you do not have to go in that order, I personally just go with the flow and move from an area to the other.. you can follow any order you want.

for the jawline try to draw it in a way to show that the character has round chubby cheeks like so.

for the hair it's up to you, if you are using colors you can just colorize it in one, or you can do like me and draw it as you draw real hair.

following the direction of hairs in a smooth mouvement

since her hair is blond I have mostly used the lighter pencil but there are few darker areas here and there where I needed the dark one

That's pretty much it. the drawing does not look a lot like the picture but like I said this is just a quick demonstration to show you how to cartonize a face. I didn't put a lot of effort to make it perfet, I just hope you got the point.

Remember the directives below: