Create Perfect Characters Project

Creating your own cartoon character is fun and involves your imagination. You need to be unique and creative with a good sense of fun. What kind of character do you want to introduce to this world? Will your character be the next Fred Flintstone? You never know, so why not try to find out? Create your own right now.

Activity# 1 07/02

• Think of an interesting, unique concept for your cartoon character.
• Think about Mickey Mouse, the mouse with the large ears, or Dumbo, the flying elephant.
• Cartoon characters usually have superpowers, funny or interesting characteristics, and fun names.
• When you have all three of these components decided, you have the foundation for your cartoon character.
• Start thinking of the characteristics and traits you've just assigned your character, start making rough sketches of your character's physical appearance.

Activity# 2 Rough sketches

• Cont’d drawing rough sketches of your character's physical appearance.
• After you've made a rough sketch of your cartoon character.
• Cartoon characters usually have "cute" appearances: large eyes; expressive, friendly faces. Does your sketch reflect your cartoon character's personality? Once you have everything down, proceed to draw your character, based on the sketch you did in the last step.
• Scan the rough sketches to the computer

Activities 4 Coloring Your Rough sketches

• Open Photoshop to color your pencil sketch

• Follow these easy steps to color your pencil sketch

1. Open your image in Photoshop
2. Make a new layer, select the brush tool, pick a color and set the blend mode of the layer to 'Multiply'
3. Start painting one thing that's going to be in the same color, for example: face, hair or the shirt.
4. When you're done with that, make a new layer and colorize another thing.
5. The image looks boring because there are no effects on it. We are now going to use the two tools: 'Color Dodge' and 'Burn Tool'. Note that Color Dodge' makes a color lighter and that 'Burn Tool' make a color dark
   
6. Click on the 'Burn Tool' and select a pretty big brush size for example 100. Start painting the image darker on the left side of the image. You should do this on all the layers you have
7. Do the same things with the 'Color Dodge'-tool, but now make it lighter.
8. Click on the eraser tool to erase some of things you don’t want.