Some Useful Tips
After each lesson or strategy, their are some great activities or challenges to try your hand at.
- Simplicity: Life is like a stick figure. You can make it simple or as complicated as you want. So choose your path wisely and remember: simple art can be just as effective as the fanciest art. In other words, it is not how many lines you draw, it’s how you draw them that counts.
- Self-Expression: Creating stick figures is about expressing yourself through art. It’s about talking with your stick designs instead of with your mouth. So before you start drawing, think of the message you want to communicate. And then practice how to say it with your design.
- Laughter: The most important rule when drawing the stick figures or cartoons is that you must be able to laugh at yourself… and at your art. Normally if someone laughed at an artist’s work, the artist might be offended. But a stick figure artist invites laughter as a positive sign that the art is doing it’s job. Keep having fun and spreading joy, and your art will go a long way.
- Tools: You don’t have to use a pencil. You can create some really interesting designs using paint, ink, crayons, chalk, and markers. It’s fun to experiment with new tools. By experimenting with different mediums, you could end up creating a super personal and distinct style that people recognize as yours.
- Body shape can tell us a lot about a person.
- Ovals are great for showing size and strength, especially if you are trying to portray a larger character like a football player, a wrester, or even a monster. Ovals also provide a great space in which to add details to the body, like clothing, jewelry, and accessories, which work well if you are creating a uniformed character like a police officer, fireman, etc.
- Triangles have always been a traditionally great shape for quickly identifying female characters. Today’s stick girls are hip to wear anything they want, and a triangle can sometimes be very restrictive when it comes to creating fun poses. So, feel free to explore the triangle-shaped torso for your girl characters, but just don’t get too traditional.
- The stick or line is probably the most common torso. When it comes to portraying thin, nothing beats a single line stick body. However this ship is more than just a quick fix; it also provides the most artistic freedom to create action, movement, and poses. If your stick figure is going to be on the move or striking a pose, it’s a stick body you want.
- Challenge:
- Try creating stick figure characters using some different body shapes (oval, triangle or line). Also try changing the height or width of the body shape. Explore how they impact the look and feel of your stick characters. Can you think of other random shapes that might work for your characters too?
- Think about what your stick figure is doing? Any action or lack of action will be portrayed in the stick figure’s legs and arms. Is the stick figure running, jumping, standing, posing, or flying?
- Whatever they are doing, the stick figures arms and legs are the key ingredients to illustrating action, body language, and emotion or feeling.
- Arms crossed show stubbornness; arms up show confusion; legs crossed while seated show relaxation.
- There is a lot to consider when adding appendages to your subject.
- Challenge:
- In this exercise, add some arms and legs that will best match the stick subject you are envisioning.
- Try some action poses that would represent different actions like running, jumping, dancing, boxing, or golfing.
- Try to portray some different emotions like joy, excitement, surprise, boredom, confusion, sadness, and fear.
- Experiment with the size and proportions of the limbs and torso. Play with crazy combinations like a tall body with short arms, or long legs on a short body.
- Hands and feet are important in expressing body language.
- Despite their importance, they are often omitted in stick figure art.
- Whether it’s a six-fingered hand, a fistful of anger, or a fully detailed pair of spiked cleats, creating the right hands and feet can be just he detail that puts your character ahead of the pack.
- Some characters do great with simple stick fingers and toes, especially in action poses where the hands are empty and you are not looking to draw attention to the hands and feet.
- However, if you are wanting to arm your stick figure with something like a tool, a ball, or a weapon, then an oval-shaped balled-hand may be a more suitable choice, since the oval shape does a great job at simulating a fist.
- You could choose to dress up your stick figures with specialized hands and/or feet if you wanted to really draw attention to them or to turn them into a themed element.
- Challenge:
- In this section, you are to take a hands-on approach and try varying the styles of hands and feet. Experiment with both simple and detailed hands and feet. Feel free to get free with your appendages, like adding a giant “Number 1” finger, a large baseball glove, combat boots on a soldier, a claw on a monster, or whatever comes to mind.
- The look, style, and shape you choose for your stick figure’s head will say a lot about their character.
- For example, a large, round head could communicate the figure appears “chunky”, while a thinner, oval-shaped head might be more appropriate for a skinnier character.
- Slanting an oval head is a great way to portray action or movement in a particular direction.
- But no matter what head shape you choose, nothing will put you character over the top, better than what you put on top of it. Yup… we mean hair and head accessories.
- Hairstyles say a lot about a person, and they say a lot about stick figures too.
- Unique hair styles can really spice up a stick figure and are essential tools for portraying unique traits and personalities.
- Using the right hair and accessories can also be a great way to identify age, era, occupation, gender, and even race or religion. Hair and accessories can suggest an attitude or even a musical preference.
- So whether you’re sporting a ball cap, rockin’ a Mohawk, pigtails, or a geeky bowl cut, your stick figure’s head and hair will be an essential part of your character’s story.
- Even if you give your stick figure a bad haircut, it’s not a big issue. You can grow the hair back in a matter of seconds with your pencil, and you can even shorten those feathered bangs with a slight brush of your eraser. So don’t be afraid to experiment.
Challenge:
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- With the face, we can finally take a look into your character’s psyche.
- The eyes might be the window to the soul, but a stick face can reveal more about it’s character than we could ever dream of.
- In the face we can tell what a character is thinking and what they are feeling.
- Is it in their eyes? Mouth? Eyebrows? Or all of the above?
- Your stick figure can turn from Crazy Mary to Saint Mary depending on how you illustrate her face.
- Challenge:
- Practice drawing stick figures facing different situations that invoke an emotion. What is going on in your stick figure? Did he just walk into the wrong bathroom? Perhaps he just saw his ex with his best friend? Or maybe the character’s team just won a huge game?
- In the real world, stereotyping and profiling are frowned upon. But in the stick world, stereotypes rule, as they provide visual clues to help make it easier to identify the gender of your stick figure.
- For example some artistic details like eyelashes, facial hair, hair styles, body shape, clothing and accessories to be closely associated with specific genders in pop-culture.
- Challenge:
- Try drawing some stick figures using stereotypical details to identify gender. If the characters is female try giving it some eyelashes, lips, and maybe even a triangular skirt. Try some different hairstyles. Maybe she's a ponytail kind of gal. If your character is a guy or dude, figure out what makes him stand out in the crowd. Is it the spiky hair and soul patch? Of his shaved head and goatee.
- The key is to hone in on something that that will immediately identify your character as male or female. Know that is not necessarily just one thing but often a a combination of several things that define the gender.