How to draw a cartoon car - Part 3

Establish the Form of the Car

I start by choosing the top of the car as my key reference line. Using my left hand, I employed the measuring technique across the whole picture and started making crosses and filling in the lines.

So it's kind of like connecting the dots. I measure, make a cross [x], and join them together. At this stage, I use the 2B pencil and draw as lightly and as broadly as I can. It's so light that you can hardly see the lines in the image above, but that's ok. As long as you can see the form of the subject emerging, we're done with this step.

I personally draw very lightly with pencils, so I can draw lightly with a 2B pencil. If you are used to pressing hard when you draw, you can choose a lighter pencil like HB to work with.

You can continue to make changes to the light pencil marks until you are satisfied with how it comes out.

Step 2: Establishing Lines

I use a 4B pencil to firm up the lines. This is the stage where I make notes about how we want to draw. I do a light shade of the areas that I want to darken, fill the eyes in, and left out areas where I need to avoid.

Step 3: Shading

Next, using the 4B pencil, I establish a rough background shade. I then picked up an 8B pencil and darken certain areas like the mouth area, the windscreen outline and the ground shadow.

I continue to work on the sketch using the caressing technique to smoothen out some parts and make the shades kind of blend into each other. I also picked up a graphite lead to shade in the background.

Using the layering technique, I just kept working on areas that I wanted to darken.