Cartoon Sketching: Draw borders around felt-tip marker sketches

A quick way to make funny images is to quickly draw something with a felt tip marker, then draw borders around the boundaries made with your felt tips. Here’s an example of how to start:

Stage 1 rough cartoons by Karen Little

The first step in this process looks very weak, but when you sketch around the lines you made with the felt tips using a black pen, suddenly the images come alive.

Stage 2 transforming rough cartoons by Karen Little

Here is another example. Loosely make your cartoon figures, then draw borders around your lines. Easy and fast to do and the borders give your images a chunky finished look.

Example of drawing borders on cartoon lines by Karen Little

This method can also be used to enhance kids drawings. Depending on how busy the original drawing is, outlining the outlines can give a simple drawing the look of a poster.

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Author:

This article was written by Karen Little as part of an ongoing series of blogs on Cartoon Sketching. Published on Littleviews.com. January 21, 2020.

Reproduction of this article is free to non-commercial websites (or other media) with permission and attributes to Littleviews.com and the article’s author.

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Questions? Ask Karen Little at karen@littleviews.com.