Creating A Single Panel Cartoon

1. Introduction trailer: In a world without your single panel cartoons, the world will change one single panel cartoons at a time. In this class, you will learn to create a single panel cartoons from inception to the illustration. Learn from master cartoonist illustrator Jim Gleason, aka the imitation, who's referring to himself on this very insecure to hold a pencil incorrectly and still does. In this class, you will learn skills like creating a common concept, an overall theme for your car to go over basic slag drawing the head and figure, layer, background, color, and dimension. And you'll be learning to add words and letters. Our final cartoon. As a bonus. Some discussion in the next steps, portfolio pieces, and further recommendations for study. This class, we will not speak of tools. All you need to get started as a pencil and something to draw. You can also use a variety of online education, as well as downloaded. The choice is yours. Glass broken down into tinge or less social? They might as well be called less than that. For training purposes, the teacher with his class. He's incredible painter. But the same techniques can be employed when working using paper or other art applications. So break out of your creative holding pattern strap in, bring your trade tables up to their upright positions. And let's get ready to take this single cartoon concept for a test drive. Let's put some liberty back into the world. Currently, without your single panel cartoons. 2. Project Video: Hey, hello everybody. This is drawing a single panel cartoon from idea to finished cartoon. And you are currently listening to the project video. In this project video at the end of this class, you will have created a single panel cartoon. In addition, you will also have a whole host of materials to help you in the creation of one or more single panel cartoons. You'll have finished assets like a comment concept. This will help you narrow down your niche or style. You'll also have a character sheet if you have any recurring characters, If that is part of your comic, should also have some ideas such as interests, recurring themes, different topics you will return to in the creation of this cartoon when done with your project and in the different milestones the project, you'll want to place these resources in your project and resources section. This will also be a great place to see what others are doing in their project. And you can also get feedback and provide feedback for your fellow students. Character sheets, first drafts, concept and notes about your cartoon. These will all be available inside the project folder, and I hope you'll utilize and use the project folder to upload to so that you can just show us what you're doing and get some motivation stuff based on that. Okay? This sum is gonna be fairly material agnostic. The project is not met to talk much about materials, but here's a minimum of what you should have to be successful. And this almost goes without saying a pencil or something to draw with. A pen or something similar to ink with a brush could also work in this or a marker. Then something that you're on such as a piece of paper. You can also use cave wall or, but I doubt that it will have the same portability as a piece of paper might have. So you might want to consider portability and what you end up drawing your cartoon on. I mean, if you do it on the side of your car, That's probably that will be portable though. But then you'd have to ask people to come outside and see it. You really can't do that for many interior presentations of your cartoon. So in of course, you can also use digital tablets, graphic apps, iPads, computers, and other supplies, and these are optional. But these are in no way should impact your enjoyment of this course. For those of you curious of what I'm using for this course, Here's a breakdown of the different materials I'm using for this project. I'm using Corel Painter 2020 to do with a lot of my drawing. This makes it easy to present everything that I'm presenting as. I'll be capturing the screen for certain parts of this project. I'm also using a Mac Pro alien trash can edition, and using Mojave from MacOS X, I'm using a way com syntenic companion to, I'm using a Logic Pro X for audio, iMovie for video. A while Mike, bear in bearings your amplifier for sound, keynote for slides. And I'm using vect easy for some B-roll video footage. So without any further ado, that's what you'll have for the project. At the end of this, you'll have a great single panel cartoon that you can call your very own. And you can put it on your refrigerator. Or if you want to paint on the side of your car, you can do that if you so choose. And I hope to see you in these upcoming videos where we are going to tackle the ins and outs, the ups and downs, the diagonals and orthogonals of single panel cartooning. And I hope you'll tune in and get your pencils ready. And open up your sketch pads and begin. The wonderful joy of creating a single panel cartoon. See you there. Bye. 3. Concept and Character: Welcome to creating a single panel cartoon, and this is less than one, determining concept and character. Well, you made it to the first lesson, everybody and welcome In hope you're gonna get your pencils ready and get things going here. Okay, So the objective of this lesson is to identify the key elements of a single panel cartoon. Generate ideas for the cartoon. Develop characters to populate that cartoon. What is a single panel cartoon? I'm sure you guys have already know the answer to this question as you are in this lesson, you didn't just wander out of the deep and think this is portrait painting. A single panel cartoon, aka a gag cartoon uses one panel to tell a joke or a story. They usually show a single funny scene with a brief dialogue or a caption underneath. It can be very simple, but still imply quite a lot. So there you go. There's your definition. In a nutshell. This is the anatomy of a single panel cartoon. For those of you playing at home, this is what it looks like. There's the title of the cartoon itself. You, that's one of the joys of creating the cartoon. As you get to decide what your title should be. There's gonna be optional dialogue, usually in the upper portion of the cartoon. There's the illustration itself, which includes the background foreground, middle ground elements, like in the case of this Plato and Plato cartoon that I created. And then of course you have the caption, which will be either in addition to the dialogue or it could actually be the dialogue itself. It's interesting how that works. So the elements of the single panel cartoon, on the other hand, these are just the traits of it. This is different than the anatomy. They are clear and concise ideas. Strong visual impact, sense of humor, hopefully a sense of humor. I mean, some of the cartoons that I've come up with is debatable on whether I have a sense of humor or not. And of course, well-developed characters were available. Sometimes you'll have one-off gag cartoons where the characters are not recurring. But in this one we're going to deal with both the concept of a single panel cartoon in regards to one-off cartoons, as well as to create some recurring cartoon characters just to handle both those eventualities. So now I want to go over brainstorming ideas for a cartoon. And here we'll talk a little bit about where you can get your inspiration from and developing a concept for the cartoon. So first of all, maybe you have a favorite hobby, like I was thinking, if you're into cars, you can do a whole cartoon, one panel cartoon based on all the things surrounding cars, like dealing with the customers if you're in service. I'm dealing with people who deliver parts. What kinda parts are available for cars. You could even do deal with the whole current events situation, which apparently is people stealing catalytic converters from the bottom of cars and reselling them for money. Secondly, is what makes you think that is, for instance, just something that you're interested in, something you're curious about. And you can always add some brainstorming ideas to that. Like comedians constantly had these observational and questionable type of cartoons and gags where they asked things like, why do we drive on Parkway is in park and driveways, that kind of thing. Why is there valet parking at the sizzle or if you're in LA, there's observations that you are passionate about, things that you want to get down to the bottom of and kinda show the humerus and ridiculous nature and absurdity of them. There's your favorite genre, fiction. Perhaps that could be something, it'd be a great. Anything in pop culture could be something that's important in regards to inspiration too. One panel cartoons. And finally, I'd just like to ask a question for those brainstorming out there what other topics would be great for a one panel cartoon? So now we're gonna move into recurring characters. And this is something else you want to think about as you're going through it. Because for one panel cartoon or single panel cartoon, you definitely want to have characters in it for those recurring situations. So in developing your character, you'll decide what your characters species is, what their name might be, what are their personalities, their physical appearance, and their background? And we'll talk a little bit more about background in the next lesson. But in this one, you just kinda coming up with the idea of a character. And then we'll move into backgrounds concerning that character. In the next lesson, begin sketching your character now, and I'll have a kind of overlay of that event. I'm a time-lapse, if you will, of the process of creating a character and creating a character sheet. This will include like the character and numerous poses from front and back and side and three-quarters to use. And hopefully you'll be able to use that. Because once you can get your character down, it will make the whole process of creating that character on a recurrent basis so much more easier. And I wish I had learned this back in the day. I often would just go half cocked the very beginning and have to go back and revise my characters. Finally, I wanted to add just one last thing for those of you that are intimidated by the whole drawing process. If you look through a variety of cartoons, you'll see that there's a whole range of artistic ability associated with these cartoons. Some people just have stick figures in their cartoons. You can do this as well. Please do not be intimidated by how elaborate or how simple cartoon will look. Because in the end, it really just comes down to your audience and you as to how detailed that should be. To give you an example that I have a, one of the first character set I ever created as a kid was a character named Al Davis, not to be confused with the owner or the previous owner of the Oakland Raiders. This Al Davis was a head with hands and he basically was a pitch man for my cartoons. You would do a lot of commercials throughout my makeshift magazine that I created in a spiral notebook as a kid. And that has been my lifelong friend throughout my life. And hopefully you'll create characters yourself that you will carry with you for a long time to come in, maybe you already have. So don't be too hard on yourself. If you can't really get the whole character creation down to a science that you're having trouble creating different views. Just do what you can and keep moving forward and propelling yourself to move on to the next lesson. We'll be glad to see you there in lesson number two, which is beyond the whole subject of backgrounds. 4. Getting The Background: Hello everybody and welcome to creating a single panel cartoon. Listened to getting down with the background. What's the objective of this lesson? First is to develop a setting that will convey the cartoon concepts, learned some general principles of perspective, and more on the history and background of the characters. That's what we're planning to do with this lesson. So let's get things started, shall we? So in this background squared lesson, in a cartoon, backgrounds can run from simple to elaborate. In a similar vein, the history of your characters. If they recur, also can be conveyed and how they talk, what they wear, and whatever history you want to introduce concerning them. For instance, this octopus cathedral like character is a chef. It is conveyed by the tools of his amputated limb. So when drawing backgrounds, some things to consider our perspective, color in the setting, in the background, using patterns, textures, gradients and backgrounds, and prompts in creating the background and setting. So there's a couple of different types of perspective. First of all, there's two types perspective. There's atmospheric, where there's overlapping shapes, desaturated colors. The further back you go, and less details and more blurry becomes. Now the way I handle my own backgrounds in my cartoons is I tried to steer away from using any sort of outlining or line work in my backgrounds. While the foreground has some definite line work to it. Once you start seeing buildings, I use mainly color and maybe some shading to convey an idea of detail in these backgrounds. So that's atmospheric. As far as linear perspective goes, we have examples of those different types of perspective. There's one-point perspective, which in linear perspective is everything converges towards one point on the horizon. That is known as one-point perspective. In two-point perspective, you have two points on the horizon line and is on the horizontal line. In terms of linear perspective, you'll have two points on the same line, horizon line. Then for three-point perspective, you'll have three points. And two will be on one horizon line, and then the third will be on a vertical horizon line as well to show how tall a building or maybe seeing it from above. So those are the three different forms of linear perspective. More background thoughts. When incorporating your characters into the background, It's important to make sure that you contrast them with the background. So this includes things like having more detail, these characters than the background. Also making sure that there aren't any tangents in the background that continue on the character itself. And finally, that you want the character to be the central focus. And that is either you could make the background for more colorful than the character itself, or you can make the character far more colorful than the background that they inhabit. As you get your backgrounds and characters ready, makes sure that you experiment with different techniques. Learn how to texture and add color and depth to your characters and how to add further contrast between them and their background. In addition to the setting background of a cartoon that you actually literally draw, we're actually now going to talk about the backgrounds of your characters and that is their histories, where they came from and what kind of characters they are. These are often tied to the character histories. So you got, here's some ideas for a possible one panel cartoon is, it takes place in a coffee shop or during the Renaissance, or inside of a classroom. Maybe touring as a musician, even we're on a movie set. Then again, you could have a cartoon in space or the zoo, or meanwhile back at the ranch, or finally a salad bar. But that really depends upon the type of character that you have. And it's interesting that the backgrounds of the characters are tied to all the settings. So in terms of character, we're talking about what is the character species? Are they animate or inanimate? What are their names? What it's a personality, what is their physical characteristic or appearance, and what is the background? And by that I mean history. So the next steps of doing this is to create a background with your characters. Make sure that the characters don't get lost in the background. And if they do, figure out what ways that could change. So for my cartoon cats, do the cat brainstorming ideas about them. I want to get some traits and things going on. The decided how to make his background. So I noticed that stews a goofy cat, he loves his box city, sleeps in his owners baffled by them. Let's do often gets dirty. Sometimes do unlike other cats, doesn't land on his feet. Let's do is a bit naive. He's missed divided by things like leaves and being outdoors and things that other animals probably fine, taken for granted, just do as problems with. These are the brainstorms that I'm going through to figure out what kind of background and puts do with stews, also like perpetually happy. And then of course do sometimes gets frustrated. And students constantly contacted about his car insurance. Let's do orange. Maybe we may, we may do the whole orange cat thing. But I think it's a little bit laid out with heat cliff and Garfield. And so you get an idea here of the different kinds of brainstorming that occurs around your characters and just different thoughts on them. And of course, some of these characteristics will work and others will not, depending on how you move forward with a cartoon, but it's good to have something to start out with. So now that we got stews, characteristics nailed down, we're gonna move on and figure out just kinda create a background of one of his favorites setting. And by that I mean his cat house, which is a box. I'm doing a very quick sketch, although it's alive. And this is showing stews cardboard box. Just drawing it, getting it ready for him to inhabit. It's got a little welcome flap there on his box. It's a little taped up because it's old and ratty looking. And yeah, that's kind of like and of course, where this box is is right next to a door where the owner can come and drop food down for Stu I didn't include as cat dish, but it probably would be over there on the right. And of course, in case stew isn't able to read or for others benefit that. Actually, I also write stews place on the side of the box. And as you can see, I drew the door frame here to kinda give an idea of placement of students house in the hierarchy of the larger houses outside. And there's me to telling the labeling the different parts of the cartoon. So there you go, buddy. Good times. And I hope this helps out with you guys in regarding this to us, do and creating your own cartoon backgrounds. And I hope to see you in the next lesson for lesson three. 5. First Concept: Hello everybody and welcome to lesson number three and creating a single panel cartoon, also known as first concept as opposed to first contact. So let's see objective in this lesson. Well, this time is time for you to come up with your first cartoon idea. Then also find different places to gain inspiration. A few ideas if you get stuck. And remember, don't get caught between a cat and this toy. So first concept. So inspiration come from a variety of sources, experiences, pop culture, current events, memories, funny stories you heard, or observations and skies limit. You may be like a recent podcasts yours, you might get an idea from that or you're sitting at a traffic light and all sudden this idea comes to you. Ideas can come from anywhere. Make sure that you take advantage and jot them down whenever you can. And now with that in mind, Here's some tips when concepts. That is, first of all, keep a sketchbook. Keeping a sketchbook, Wow, that's a big one. You can also use it to jot down ideas. And the more you do cartooning, the more ideas will come. Take it from me as I've been doing this for awhile. That the more you do it, the more ideas that come as a result of it. Second thing to do is of course, brainstorm ideas alone in groups or as a party game. Finally, refine ideas, tightening and consolidating is, and then making sure that there is simple and easy to follow as possible. I've had a problem in the past where my text is way too long and it might be an incredible run-on sentence and just people get confused from reading it. And then they're stuck wondering what the cartoon was about in terms of brainstorming. That's gonna be kind of what this whole lesson is about. And that is finding that concept. Because without a good concept, you'll find yourself just not really doing much of anything. So couple of ideas is look for something that you want to draw on Pinterest. Now for me, I get Pinterest ideas coming in just about every day. And I'll look at them on my e-mail. And then from that, I might just start drawing something and from that idea will emerge. So maybe you see one of a robot. You can create a comic evolving robots. Maybe your robot goes to Robo, Dr. finds out he needs to get his armory attack. Also think about relative relevant ideas like AI. Maybe you have a funny concept of a robot worrying that as jumbled be taken over by a human. Or in my case, as you'll see coming up, I came up with a cartoon idea that will pretty much apply to just about anybody no matter what their cartoon is. And you'll get to see it in develop through trial and error. So a couple of ideas. If you get stuck, think about something you want to draw. Like I said in the last panel. Look on Pinterest. Just look up different things you're interested in. And then maybe that'll lead to something or just begin doodling. You don't even have to have any ideas at all. Sometimes I find that the very act of drawing, of doing something artistic leads to an idea. And of course, there's plenty of places on the internet you can find drawing prompts. And so my suggestion is to, is to look around, see what you can find and then take up those challenges. And then hopefully that will lead to some great comic ideas. Couple of examples of ideas that I had for my cartoon visual banter. One is I came up with the idea of what would happen if I wanted to create a, almost a Christmas holiday card of like grumpy characters. And I thought if oscar the grouch and your grumpy, The Dorf and the Grinch. And they all got together and decided to pose for a Christmas card. So that's a great Christmas card idea, by the way, in case you guys want to steal that and create your own version of it. And then think of other like grumpy characters that you wouldn't necessarily associate with Christmas. Then of course, the second one that I had was I just wanted to drop ping. When I remember when doing this one. I thought, well, what is this penguin doing? He's hiding a mallet behind his back. And why is he doing that? And then you just start developing concepts and figuring things out. And I came up with the whole idea of pink when offering a shark or free sandwich or free penguin burger. And then the sharks like, I don't get it but what, what's what's the catch? And of course, the catch is he's about to get it. So next steps after you develop your idea at possible captioning dialogue to it. And before we end this live different hands-on tutorials. The first one is going to be in regards to brainstorming and workshopping that first concept for your first comic. The first idea, concept. I've been using the word concept away too much. Sarah, brainstorming some ideas from current events, pop culture observation. And now I'm just drawing things like maybe a cartoon about a cow. Let's do the cat ideas. Go shopping, picks a fight with a leaf, goes to a post office and then forgets and there's something going on there. And this and that, well, that's different was also one of the many things that can go in many different directions. And that's ultimately what I came up with. In regards to the brainstorming ideas. The Big Lebowski is one of the concepts that came up with in regards to some movies and other interests I might have. In addition to just current events and experiences. The term, Terminator. Skynet needs to update cereal and stop and ask for directions. Once the user changes though, the Siri to a place where all the heels of breads congregate together. So there you go. A couple of ideas for brainstorming. This is gonna be more specific ideas about, well, that's different. So this little kind of give you some textual ideas of where you can go with that idea. So now we're going to work on the stool, the cat. Well, that's different. Caption. That can even be shortened to, that's different. There's 1s2 watching the dog doing something strange and dog-like. Fateful psych, I'm doing some sort of Pictionary here. So a dog typing, a dog, checking his phone, a dog or reading the newspaper and all that kind of stuff. A dog receiving takeout. And actually that actually moved into what the cat was doing. I like this whole idea about the cat and actually do it being the recipient of this, a bird carrying luggage back to its tree. That was another idea. A squirrel with acorn allergies list goes on and on. A tree that fill alone in the woods. Makes annoyed, sir, buddy. Thank you very much for watching this video. And we look forward to seeing you in lesson four, which is beginning to get the layout together for the cartoon. 6. Getting the Layout: Welcome to lesson four of creating a single panel cartoon. Getting with the layer. Well, our buddy, What's the objective for this lesson? Now that you've got an idea, it's time to lay it out and do some thumbnails, rough them out, decide what you want, provide some focus to your cartoon. One of the things we're gonna be trying to do in addition to that is simplify and make the cartoon is clear as possible. One of the great things about doing a layout, if you get to see what works and what doesn't work, and what looks satisfying and what doesn't look satisfy family. One of the objectives is to troubleshoot the tangents and lack of contrast that might be affecting your layout and prevent from having a cohesive structure. So getting the right layout, the layout of comics should work to deliver the message in a clear, concise manner. You want to know the subject to the cartoon is at once. Understand who is talking. If anyone is talking and get the gag almost instantly. If you have elaborate backgrounds, many different characters, this becomes even more important. So what are the principles of good layout? Well, first of all, there's balance. What is balanced? You'd want a good cohesion of balance between the background and the foreground. Like if you had a very small character in your foreground. And that was contrasted by a huge elaborate background that would be like an imbalance. Consequently, if you have too many, if you have two characters crowded together on one side of the composition, that will cause an imbalance as well. So a way to achieve balanced system, make sure that for every element on the one side, there's some sort of element balancing it out on the other. If there's an element in the foreground, you want it to be balanced with the background now sometimes and in cartoons, there is no background at all. So really what you're dealing with is making sure that there's balance between the element and the negative space. The third thing, of course, is heirarchy. When you're creating a cartoon, you want to make sure that the things that draw your eye to it, certain parts of it are drawn to that which is most important. So say if I took a really long time creating an elaborate background that has nothing to do with the cartoon itself. And your eye is drawn to that, that will make it a very ineffective cartoon. You might even question what it is you're even looking at. There have been cartoons that I've looked at that I just didn't get it. I just didn't understand. Now let's say you are creating a cartoon where you are trying to use that as a point that the person feels lost in the world. If you created a background like that where it drowns out the main character of the cartoon, then that would be ineffective concept saying, I feel lost in this room and you can't see the character very easily. Well, of course, they feel lost in whatever place therein. So it depends on what your intention is, but mainly in terms of hierarchy, what you want to make sure to do is the characters, the situation, the thing that is incongruent, which doesn't make sense in reality, that is the GAG. These are things that should draw the eye. Here are three examples of different cartoons in which I employed some of these techniques to show contrast, to show hierarchy and to show balance. In the big bird cartoon, I showed how Big Bird in color contrast it with the background. In the second cartoon, I showed that the cat had no background with holding two items to show a bit of an imbalance, a balance between the two elements and the main element of the care character itself. Then in the third cartoon, which is of a rooster playing a guitar, I put the rooster in the foreground and then had other items on the other side in the background. Now, you could actually argue probably that the contrast shown in this one might be a little confusing because of the detail that I had in the background as well as in the foreground. But there was an attempt here to show some differentiation between the foreground and the background. Let's go. This creates some thumbnail drawings and explore different options for the comic, different perspectives, poses, different backgrounds. And this is where you get to have some fun and play around. You can even play around with the different concepts in terms of the idea. Or that's different that I've explored in the last lesson. I will show you in the layouts that I made different variations of things that support this cartoon. And this can also help you decide what it is you really want to draw when you create a thumbnail layout that there's some layouts that you may have thought were great initially, but they turned out to be boring or something that you really didn't want to get into once you approached the layout. Whereas others might have jump, jump out at you. The one that you thought wasn't so good at beginning, might begin to appeal to you once you get the visual behind it. So of course, when you're also dealing with the thumbnail drawings, you want to consider the rule of thirds framing and leading lines. And that is, as far as the rule of thirds goes, you divide the cartoon panel into three different quadrants, three different rows and three different columns. And then make sure that some of the main elements of those are in those thirds. As opposed to simply putting the most important thing right in the center of the frame. You actually draw the i2 certain areas of the comic in order to make it more effective. Then of course you have framing and leading lines which are also at ways of drawing the eye to certain parts of the comic. You can do that by simply putting the eyes of a character in the direction of another character or creating certain lines in the comic itself, which can be prospective lines or objects that point to that as well. And that can be the leading lines that lead to what is important inside of the composition. So then finally, in your thumbnails, think of the shapes, lines, and patterns to enhance the impact. Sometimes patterns can be a little bit involved in, can actually detract the eye from them rather than focus on them. And so this can actually lead to showing the difference between character and background. Or at other times of adding a pattern inside of say, a character's clothing or a texture to their face may actually increase the contrast and may draw the eye to that character. So that's a little bit on how to use shapes, lines, and patterns to enhance the impact. And of course, we're shapes. A different type of shape can definitely draw the eye. So maybe you have like a whole cartoon full of circles. Then you have that one triangular shape that's going to draw the eye. That's the novelty of it. So in troubleshooting, one of the things you gotta be concerned about when creating a cartoon. It's not to make tangents and lines that confuse around the character that is like a background or an object that's shares aligned with the main character. Other times it comes from just having weird poses of a character where it's, you're unsure from looking at the silhouette of a character, what it's doing. And you can do that by altering its pose and changing it in some way. Then of course, there's improper contrast between characters and background could detract focus or confuse the audience. And we've gone over that before. And of course, the way to handle that is to either move the main character away from those areas or to either eliminate or minimize areas of the background that can cause those confusion. In contrast, if the comic lacks focus or it's not clear, the first response should be to simplify wherever it is possible. And this is a good, it's like when in doubt, just simplify if you have things that are too elaborate. If you've added things in that you thought would be fun and cool. Well, they may not necessarily be the best thing to help your comic be successful. So after you do some thumbnails, you can finalize the layout. That is, you pick it. The next move is to refine it. You can use rulers and guides to help develop an effective layout. And of course, once you pick that final layout, you'll want to enlarge it or find a way to copy it over into a more elaborate form and then work on it in that way. Finally, next steps, create some thumbnails. The cartoon, at least four would be a good amount to shoot for. One should even be without a background. In cartoons, simpler is better once you create a layout. Think of ways that might be edited to make it even easier to read or understand. Throughout the rest of this lesson, we're going to show you a couple of examples of creating thumbnails, which ultimately led to the final layout, which I used in order to create the single panel cartoon for steel the cat for this class, c. In this video, I'm going to draw a nine different layouts. Instead of just four. Way I did that is I created just ones that approximate the size of the cartoon. And of course, then I started doing some of the, the rule of thirds to kinda give you an example of one of the layouts. Showing the cat looking at some sort of incongruence. Human. Again, a second version of it showing a animal writing a guy, a bicycle. Af, third version of it, showing a robot dog. Fourth version of the cat, noticing something like a giant fish in a yard. And a fifth version showing the cat, just the bottom of the cat, kind of standing on the street and someone noticing something strange about the cat having a gun in a holster. And then I had another version of a cat looking up in a tracing the bird with luggage, leaving the nest or at least returning to it from his migration vacation. And then we have another version here of the cat looking at his phone and a person like noticing that from far off going, This is weird though that's different. And there's a cat hanging upside down at the top of the frame and a dog looking up at them. And finally we have a cat inside a house or something looking at a mouse of some sort. And that was it. So there were nine different explorations of a well that's different layout. And that kind of gives you an example of how to do some thumbnail layouts for your cartoon. So that's showing nine different layouts for a thumbnail cartoon. And that is it for this lesson on how to create a good layout for your first single panel cartoon. And I hope to see you again in episode five, or less than five. I hope to see you again in less than five, which is sketching out and refining that layout into your cartoon. Hope to see you there. 7. Getting A Little Sketchy: Hello everybody. Welcome to lesson five of creating a single panel cartoon. Getting a little sketchy, and it is getting a little bit sketchy. And here, let me tell you what's the objective of this lesson. Well, now that you have a layout that you've picked out, it's time to finalize that and actually also start tightening things up a little with sketching, refining the composition. Yet it's still okay here, even as you are finalizing and clarifying to do some experimentation, as if you need my permission to do so. So this is gonna be a bit of a sketchy fun and let me tell you this is one of the funnest parts of the project. You can still be kinda loose. You can still play around some, there's no rendering involved. Unless you really are like set on what kind of layout you're doing. You can still mess around a little bit, so you're not stuck yet. You can still play around, as I just said. That's what sketching does. It allows you to mess with poses, expressions, prompts, backgrounds. Make sure there aren't any tangents. And you can still move things around and make some changes here and there. So that's some good times about the sketching. Part of the intimidation factor of any sort of art is feeling that you have, there's no turning back that you've put something down and now you can't undo it. But as long as you're using a light lines and creating or sketchy lines here and there. There's always something else in there that you can do. If you have like tracing paper, you can always trace over your drawing and just make another go at it. Things have not reached the point of no return yet. That's part of the fun of cartooning, is realizing that even in the mistakes do you make, they can actually be funny mistakes and be incorporated into the cartoon itself. So here's some principles of sketching to think about before we actually do some hands-on sketching of the final layout. And I got that for prestige of the cat. Some principles of sketching is using light. That is kind of picking out what areas are going to be light. Areas are going to be dark. And you can like a little cross hatch marks and little indicators that those parts of the image are going to be in shadow and light. You want to use some loose lines here. You don't have to really nail down the design of your characters quite yet here. And you can still play around a little bit and keep things a little bit loose. Maybe experiment with some different poses. And of course, you'll want to highlights some shapes and forms of your cartoon just to get more of an idea of what those things are that will impact the overall look of your cartoon. Then indicates some shading and texture, like I said, using light. That's one of the ways that you use light as to show shading and texture and more light and dark ally. Finally, you might want to add some dialogue into your sketches to indicate where the dialogue will be and when you know this kind of information, you don't have to be so elaborate on the background to create it. So because that part will be hidden from the overall cartoon due to the fact there'll be dialogue in there. Then of course finally, you want to refine the sketch. And that is, as you're doing some loose lines there at the beginning, you'll notice which ones you like and which ones you don't like. And you'll begin to clean up the image by removing the ones you don't like and solidifying those that you do like. So there you go, our everybody. So this lesson is going to do a hands-on tutorial and sketching, although I don't know if this is what will be the end-all be-all of what you would consider to be sketching. But we definitely get pretty close here in this lesson. And as I go through my process of creating, solidifying the layout, I'll show you where I went with this. Still you can explore different ways to draw your characters, different poses, expression, different prompts and even wardrobe. I think I mentioned that recently. I feel like I've been mentioning it over and over again, but it bears repeating that nothing is nailed down quite yet. You can still change and add to and refine and add different details. And you can even change the designer of your character. It's not nailed down as, as anyone knows from recurring cartoons, there's a definite change in character over time. If you look at early Snoopy and Garfield, they are quite different from the latter versions. And if you even look at old Bloom County like strips, you'll notice there's a difference between the early Bloom County and later Bloom County. And this is throughout the style stuff. A lot of cartoonists that as a refined and changed our styles, different things appeal to them and they make the changes accordingly. And of course, you'll want to end drawing shows some different shading techniques. I mentioned crosshatching, but there's regular hashing and then there's also different marks you can make to full add dimension and show the different shading types to define character. And sometimes that will include textures as well. So I said crosshatching is one. And then there's one where you can just make marks that are all parallel to one another. Then there's the very slight, almost imperceptible shading that occurs by just doing small motions of your pencil. And then, uh, finally, you want to show how background is indicated in different ways. Like I said, the one I like to use is to make sure that there's no, not much in the way of line in my backgrounds. That'll help bring up the line drawings that are in the foreground. But there's different things you can do as well. Minimize the background, of course is one thing. I'm, the use of props can indicate backgrounds so you don't even have to draw the background and we're getting them regard. So finalizing the sketch a lot, a lot of this will be cleaning things up and using the eraser. It's also important here, especially in analog drawing to keep your drawing clean. This is one of the problems I've always had with through my drawings because of the weird way that I draw. I bear down on the page a lot. And in so doing, it smudges the drawing. That's a big no-no, It doesn't look good in the final drawing. So maybe use a piece of paper to protect Parsi drawing that you might bear down on why you're creating your work. Finally and next steps of less than five. For fun, make another one of your layouts and sketch that out as well. The more you sketch of different scenes you might notice a style developing in your work and how you approach it. And that's one of the things that you will learn throughout this process is you'll begin to learn your own process. What makes sense to you? And you'll make the change accordingly. And from here on out, we're gonna go into a couple of tutorials, or actually one main tutorial showing my stu the cat cartoon and the different ways I approach to sketching the layout. And I'll go over that in some detail to hopefully give you some confidence as you're going through your layout and making sketches yourself. So we've got the stool, the cat logo, are still the state of the cat layout where he's looking at his phone and the main thing we're solidifying, and this is where solidifying the two-character, let's do the cat, the main character, and the background character of the person. And you'll see I go through a different number of iterations of both do and the background. I want to make the face a little bigger. I added in the phone that he's looking at. And then of course I had in refine that a little bit to show that he's looking at a map of a certain type. Not really showing much in the way of shading. But that's kind of an important here. I think I wonder. I usually just get the line work down as far as this goes. And of course, I'm going through a number of different variations of the characters in the background. Finally, I think settle on a kid in the background. The adults just well, a tutu tall and I don't like the way they. So I think part of it is Annette. A question of balance. I wanted to list adults. I wanted to get more more of a child would add balance to it where he's looking in the background and just kind of freaked out about stew and his, um, his phone app. And of course I'm drawn of different variations of height for the kid. Adding in a sidewalk, a street. Background are indicators of background. And I'll add more on the background later in the coloring section. Reason why I'm not adding much to the background is again, I'm trying to avoid the use of line work in the background to add contrast between the foreground and the background. And that's pretty much how I do the sketching in this cartoon. Yeah, so that's less than five of getting a little sketchy and creating a single panel cartoon. And we hope to see you in lesson six, which is going to be inking the cartoon. That'll be the next step in the process of creating a single panel cartoons. 8. Inking It!: Hey everybody, welcome to creating a single panel cartoon less than six known as inking it. And hey, you've got that sketch complete. So there's something to celebrate. And now we're moving on to the next state, which is really finalizing the drawing by inking it. So what's the objective of this lesson is learning inking as part of the refining process and creating a single panel cartoon. This will finalize a sketch and get it ready for publication. Swirl. We're, we're, we're getting close to being done here, folks. So in spilling some ink, for this lesson, we will focus the most on tracing over the main lines of your drawing to clearly define your character. Once you get the character ink, it'll definitely looks like a real comic book character, as in sim, similar to Pinocchio is now a real boy. Sears some principles of inking. First of all, there's learning the variations of lines. And listen. This depends a lot on the type of brush or pen that you use. If you use like a big pen, for instance, there's going to be very little variation in lines, but if you use a brush, There's definitely a lot of variation in that regard. And of course, depending on the type of pen you use, you can use like calligraphy type pen. And that'll have some interesting variations in a line. And we could almost do like a complete lesson on the different brushes and such to use to get different line widths. And for me on, in Corel Painter, I use a thick and thin brush, but there's very little variations in, and I've tried other brushes as well, but I don't find those other brushes as successful as using the thick and thin brush or thick and thin pen brush in Corel Painter to create my outline. You'll also learn some pin shading techniques. We can talk again here about just making areas dark and light. The use of crosshatching and hatching, as well as other pen techniques in order to gain some shading down. Other principles is keeping lines consistent and also showing line or lack thereof to show contrast. So what you don't want to do is have very thick lines in the background to offset your characters. Like thin lines in the foreground. Because that'll just to track the eye naturally. What you wanna do is you want to change, if you're going to change the line width between foreground and background, you better make fee lines of the characters thicker than those of the background. If you're going to use line at all. Sometimes it's better just not to use any line and just use color as a way of defining the background. Also, in principles of inking, you'll want to indicate shading and texture and adding dialogue, of course, is very important in this and you can use lettering in a different class. I learned how to actually create my own cartoon font. And I was using that actually, I believe, to create this cartoon. So there's something to think about as far as Skillshare goes is checkout lettering techniques that you can use to create your own font and use that for your cartoon dialogue. Venule have very consistent lettering in your font making. Finally, another principle of our inking is to refine the sketch. And that is you don't want the, unless it's a very experimental cartoon, you usually don't want to use a lot of loose lines. You want them to be simple and clean so that you can understand exactly what's going on. And there are variations in that. Depending on style, as far as hands-on goes, explore some different inking techniques, different line widths and very linewidth. That's, you know, just play around and try to get your own style. And of course look up other tutorials on the different inking and shading techniques. We really don't touch on it here. Because the whole idea is to get this thing up and running and not do a ton of experimentation, but definitely pause this lesson if you so desire. And go out and look at other shading techniques and how you can incorporate those in your single panel cartoons. You'll also want to use inking to show contrast, dark shadows and white highlights, as well as different shading techniques show how linewidth and other inking techniques can help in creating an effective cartoon. As you mess around with this, you'll realize that sometimes things can get murky if you use too much ink. And of course, other times, things can become confusing if you're not using much ink at all for the foreground characters and items. Finally, in finalizing the sketch, digitally, if you mess up, you can undo and make another go at it. You can also use a number of different brushes in your arsenal. In Corel Painter for instance, there are a ton of different brushes, pens, and pencils, that are available for experimentation. Now, what do you do when you mess up your cartoon on analog paper? Well, you can use white out. You can also scan your analog sketch into digital and make corrections to it in Photoshop and other apps or like me, you can work digitally and then you know, there's, there's also another item. Another way you can do it is if you really don't like your cartoon at all, and the way it's turning out, you can, you can trace over it and then make another go at it. There's no real point of no return. If you have the time and the desire to make something that you want to be the way you want it. Next steps, try and number of different variations of inking for one, just try them using pen inks to determine the main lines. Other times use it to add shading still other times to maximize and add contrast. And finally, we're gonna go into a tutorial on how I did inking for the state of the cat cartoon. So we've got the sketch from cat thing and I think I did one variation of refining and now I'm doing another where I'm doing the inking. So I did an intermediary step of actually doing an ink so many king and then I'm now doing it again and really refining. So I'm tracing over the image, refining it even further. I, first I decided to give stool color and then said, no, gotta get rid of the collar, got to try some different. They're refine the phone in the drawing here. And let me tell you just making things as simple as possible. Wanting to get the inking down. Because the next part of the thing is to create the color or tone information behind it. The KitKat with the phone, then the kid in the background. I'm kinda making him more surprised by taking the eyelids out of the original drawing to make it more like really, well that's different. Thing in themselves, are really freaking out. And that's the kinda thing you wanna do is to sometimes highlight the emotional difference between the two characters. Stewards, just looking fine, enjoying the app and the kid of course, is freaking, freaking out. Sidewalks, adding in a couple of buildings or thinking about it, but probably ultimately deciding not to. And that's it. So this is the end of lesson six of creating a single panel cartoon, inking it. And we hope to see you again for lesson number seven, where we're gonna be adding some tone and color. In my case, it's tone. So enjoy that everybody and I hope to see you there in New York minute or whatever you call it. 9. Adding Tone and Color: Hey everybody, Welcome to lesson number seven of create a single panel cartoons using color and tone. So you made it to number seven. You've got your pen and ink are all done and now we're moving into color or tone. In our case, we're going to be more focused on tone when we get to the tutorial at the very end of this lesson. So what's the objective of this lesson? So the objective of this lesson is to create a mood, a vibe, and a feeling by the colors and tone used in a single panel cartoon. You will use tone and color working together to bring humor to the world and maybe some beauty in the process. Adding tone and color, the joy of rendering. But remember not to choose just any color or tone. You don't want to let all that great inking work to go to waste. So here's some principles of color and tone before we move on too much, first thing to know is the closer the element, the more contrast. So if you're gonna be using colors in the foreground or tone in the foreground. You want to make sure that they're white. The whites are white and the darks are dark. And don't have too much mid tones there. In the foreground. This is the place like the characters. And the main foreground elements should all have either more saturated colors or they should be definitely more extreme tone. So a very dark or very light tone to them. Then as you move backwards to the depths of the cartoon, you go to more mid tones and more saturated colors. Learning about, you're also going to be learning about tone and color and maximize the ability to see one element of a cartoon drawing over another. Again, the overlapping elements you want, you want the foreground elements to definitely stick out from the background once. And you definitely want the background to just go and fade into the background. Then of course, there's the overall tone of the cartoon. If you're dealing with dark issues, like Batman cartoon for instance, you want to be mostly dark. And of course, in the case of Batman, or what you could do is you'd have him all done as a dark silhouette for the most part. And then the background behind him is highlighting his silhouette around him as you're, as you're deciding how to pick a color palette for your cartoon. You might also want to consider the style and time are your cartoon like if you have a 1920s cartoon, if something takes place there, you'll want your color palette to be commensurate with that time period. The same way in the 70s, you'll want to have that center sensibility as well. So look over the different decades, see some graphic design and color palettes in regards to those and make your choices accordingly. And then finally, the difference between saturated and unsaturated color. I didn't touch on that in the past. And just a few minutes, just few seconds go. I'm gonna do it again right here. And that is with more saturated colors there. The colors are pure. That is, the yellows are very yellow and the oranges are very orange. But as you get with unsaturated, There's either more white or more black that's or another color that's added to that color to make it less pure of what it normally is. So if, if you see like a very, very hazy background that's almost blends into the sky. That's considered unsaturated. But then so is something that is almost, barely visible in the darkness. If that gives you an idea. The next steps try number of different variations of color tone. You can reduce the drawing into smaller thumbnails again and do color studies. Study variability with different color combinations and tonal values. Lighter and darker colors, darker and lighter tones, as well as adding patterns and textures into your cartoon to also create contrast. Now there's a couple, there's one final thing I should tell you in regards to next steps. And that is if you have too many saturated colors and your cartoon like everything as a pure version of the color. Like just a standard green, blue, yellow, orange. Then it'll get very distracting. Your eyes won't know where to focus. But as you use more, sparingly, use saturated colors. And then in the background you have unsaturated. It actually brings out those n calls attention to those colors. So again, in regards to your main characters, you'll want the character to be definitely more saturated in the stick out more than the background. And by doing that, you want to have saturated colors in this foreground, elements are budding. So now we're moving to the tutorial part of this lesson that is showing how we add tone. So okay, we have our tech character here that has the, the nice drawing done to it. And now we're adding in the different colors to it, like the wide eyes we are coloring in the cat character. Scott, he's like a nice gray character. More dark gray than anything. And maybe I'll add some darkness and more in darkness into it later. But it definitely didn't want him to be an orange cat. I consider the gray more appropriate to what he's doing and I'm coloring and phone to make the phone more visible. It's definitely black. I'm adding in some spots here and there to give some, again more color variation to this character. I may simplify that with a subsequent drawings. If I'm creating this character. Now I'm working on the background character as well, adding in certain colors on him as well. And continuing that tradition. Both his skin tone and his. Then of course I'll be adding in the different colors of the background as well, probably on a different layer because this will allow to move things around as needed. So I'm adding in the street color, the sidewalks. I'm adding in the background color of across the street. And I'm also making decisions on what to include in the background. And I think in here I decided to make trees. Yes, I definitely decided to make trees. To make a nice wooded area for the background. And of course, a lot of the stuff will be covered up once the dialogue is entered into the mix. But as you can see, I'm making sure that the the background, because there is no line work. Clearly, the foreground is sticking out in regards to it. And so that's the end of creating a single panel cartoons and less than seven color and tone. And we hope to see you at lesson number eight, where we'll be adding in some highlights and shading into the mix here. 10. Casting Shade: Hey everybody and welcome to lesson Number eight of creating a single panel cartoon, casting a little bit of shade. And here we're going to talk about shading and highlights in regards to creating a single panel cartoon. So what's the objective of this lesson? Hey, that sounds like a familiar thing I've been asking for the last. What is it? Seven lessons and eight lessons now? Well, the objective of this lesson is to add depth and dimension to a cartoon by adding shade and highlights. I know, I know what you're thinking. This isn't done a lot in cartooning. And you would be correct in that assessment. If you'd like to look, go a little bit further. This is adding some icing on the cake and making the illustration even more provocative, in my opinion, adding shade and highlight. This is optional. Then again, a lot of these steps are, but if you want to go a little bit farther, a little bit further, going a little bit further and farther there. Add some shadow and highlights to the cartoon. I think you'll be glad that you did it. So what are some principles of shading and depth? Well, first of all, if you're using, if you're doing digital, if you're going digital in regards to creating a cartoon, there's using blending modes in digital cartoons. The two main ones that I use when I'm cartooning. Multiply and screen. Multiply actually adds to the whatever color that you've included already on your, your characters or tone and adds to it as multiplier implies. So adding any sort of color or tone to it adds an amount of shade to it. Then there is adding the screen mode to a certain layer that will make the brights brighter and will. I don't know if casts aspersions or add some shininess to whatever it is you want to use. And the more opacity you add to that given layer, the more highlight you give the different aspects of that part of the cart. And of course, there's a second way of adding shading and that is adding crosshatching and regular hatching as well as other marks to convey dimensionality. And there's actually some good tutorials out there in regards to how to shade in the different methods you can shade in terms of cartoons. Then you have creating gradients to show dimension. That was one of my favorites and back in the day is two. I would shade in such a way in graphite pencil as to make just very smooth gradients between the part of the character that was supposed to be in the dark, as well as that in the light. And speaking of light and darkness. One of the main things that you have to be really cognizant of is picking and consistent light source to make sure that the shading and highlights remain, as I said, consistent or constant. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense and you can get really confused. Now there are primary and secondary forms of light sources. And you can get into that as well. But really in terms of cartooning, you want to keep it fairly simple. So there's usually only one light source, and that's the main thing you even pay attention to, if any at all. Now a lot of cartoons that you see don't have any shading or dimensionality at all. So take that as you will adding dimension. So as you work digitally, you can add highlights and multiply liters and experiment with different opacities to create strong dimensions are soft variations. And my advice is if you do work digitally, just mess around with these different blending modes and opacity modes. And just to see how they work and how they affect the definite, the dimensionality of your cartoon. And you can have fun with it. As far as next steps go, try a number of different variations of shading. Experiment with multiple filters on layers and just see how it affects the overall tone and dimension of the cartoon. I think I just said something of that similar nature, but it bears repeating. That's the, the finishing touches are putting on a cartoon and adding this, this kind of stuff too. It is a lot of fun. And you'll be amazed at some of the effects that you can get from doing this kind of stuff. So next we're going to go into a tutorial of how to add some shading and some shininess to a given cartoon. In our state of the cat cartoon. Here we have the cat coming at us here. He's colored in. And now we're going to add some shading to the mix. As you can see, we've got a LIT, which I call the highlight, the Lit mode. And then we also have multimode. And so as we're working here, you can see the different highlights and multiply, multiply done throughout the, throughout the cartoon as it is. And maybe a lot of this has done subtly. So it's hard to tell. But we have multiplied two coming in. And I think what happened is I may have already added some dimensionality end of this and now I'm doing more just to show that it still can be done. I've picked a so you'll be seeing highlight on the right-hand side and you'll be seeing darkness on the left-hand side. So the light source is going to definitely be on the right hand side. As you can tell, I'm doing some multiplying some light multiplied to the trees throughout this. And I'll be adding some different highlights in as well here and there. But as you can see, I'm also adding more highlight or more and multiply to the different characters to add some dimensionality in contrast to them. This is just some basic like almost clumsy forms of creating it. And then I have another lit level to add more, even greater highlights. And as you can see, the child character is getting some more highlights on them, as well as the cat here and there as well. To add more contrast to the different characters. And we're going to continue through this and you can see the different highlights and maybe some of the stuff doesn't look the best, but you can see also highlights there on the phone. And all this stuff is just add like extra contrast and show more about what's been going on. And that is the end of the tutorial for adding highlight and shade on the subject. Now I hope that you'll join us for lesson number nine, where we add dialogue to the cartoon, or as well as maybe even adding a caption to it as well. In this case in the cap or be just adding in dialogue. And that's going to be the way to easily tell the difference between who is and who is not talking. 11. Captions and Dialogue: Hey everybody and welcome to this lesson Number nine of creating a single panel cartoon, also known as captions and dialogue. So now we're here we are, We're in the homestretch of creating that single panel cartoon. I imagine many of you have already worked ahead and you're probably done with this and you're just going, well, I need to complete this freaking class so I might as well listen to them. Listen to his voice drone on and on and going on for various and sundry times and anyways. So what's the objective or what's the purpose of this lesson? Well, it's pretty obvious, isn't it? It's adding words to images and dialogue and captions in order to tie the cartoon together just like the rug and The Big Lebowski ties the whole room together. The dialogue and the caption ties the cartoon together. And let me tell you, There's nothing more infuriating than having a cartoon without dialogue or captions that needs one. And of course, there are times when I'm very dense and somebody will include a cartoon without any caption or dialogue and I won't get it. Do not consider me to be the most intuitive all the time in regards to cartoons. So we are adding the joke to the cartoon in a single panel. Cartoons serves as a setup. And the dialogue caption is R. R is the pub. The dialogue caption or the punchline. Okay, man, I'm probably having some sort of grammatical big bad times there. So now you go into the principles of lettering. These are the principles of lettering in regards to cartoons. Some to keep thinking about. Let me tell you, the first thing I want to tell you about is I usually say this step near the end because as you're doing the cartoon, as you're beginning to draw and color it and such. Your mind will go on thinking about the idea and might refine it so you reach the end of the process and you might go, well, this caption just is too long and it's, this would be funnier in this kind of thing. So I like to make sure that the lettering comes near the end. But for some people they may want to do it in the inking phase, and I can understand that as well. So if you're confident about where the placement and the content your dialogue or caption is, then my advice is to do it during the inking face, but I like to wait till the end. Regarding the principles of lettering, makes sure the lettering does not block any vital areas of the illustration. Sometimes you'll have to bend the rules a little bit here. I've had a dialogue that's taken the head off, a character or part of a head. And there's just some things that can't be helped. But you can read, you can mess around with it. You can even change the sizing of the dialogue here and there, but I wouldn't change it too much. You want to keep the cartoon consistent between different cartoons. And if you change the sizing of the font of the lettering that you're using that will confuse people and they'll will bother them over a period of time. Especially when you create a book or a book collection, feel like, why is it like only eight point there? And then on this page it's like 12 point. And then why is it so huge on this side? Anyways, the second principle of lettering is to keep the dialogue concise and short. Let me tell you, I think I've said this before. But I did a cartoon about a warp sled in regards to Santa. And nobody understood it because it was way too much way too many words. It just went on and on and I will look around for it to included as an example, but I couldn't find it anywhere on my hard drive. So there you go. It's lost to the wins, so to speak. Although I imagine if her really looked hard enough, I could probably find it. Anyways makes sure the lettering is clean and readable. There's nothing worse. So as I said, there's nothing worse than a no caption or no dialogue. Well, I think badly written in unreadable lettering is also bad. So you gotta be very careful and very pristine and clean in your writing of the dialogue and the caption. Now, a lot of the guesswork is taken out of that. If you work digitally, you can create your own font, as I mentioned earlier, and that'll be mentioned here at the end as well. But yeah, if you look at different hand-written fonts and use that, don't use Comic Sans because that's, that's like a huge cop-out. I mean, it's like low-hanging fruit. You're going to put a Comic Sans font in a comic. I mean, come on, Let's kill. Could we get anymore on the nose? Yes. Run your words and sentences through a spell check. This is another big problem of mine, is I will get a cartoon done. I'll have it on Instagram and then realize have to recant it because I have misspelled a word or two. And I've used some bad grammar. In fact, I imagine in this very lesson you will find some bad grammar. But I'm, might just keep it just to show you that you need to do it and to know the consequences of your actions. I mean, people may just pan this whole class because of that little bit of typo in grammatical error. Finally, practice lettering beforehand to get an idea of how much room it will take. So during your layout face, you might want to practice it on a separate sheet of paper. You might want to practice it just to get an idea of how the lettering of work. And in so doing, you'll have a good plan once everything is in place. So hands-on in regards to littering be as consistent as possible. Nothing ruins a cartoon like bad lettering except maybe coffee stains. I think I just wanted to reiterate that. Finally, in regards to punchlines and dialogue, sometimes no words are needed. The image says at all. But you really have to know that it says at all that the context, everything is easily written and easily understood because otherwise, it'll be like meaning, be clueless about what the meaning is of the cartoon. So there you go. Other times. So that's part of the fun of a single panel cartoon is creating the words to punctuate the scene and bring it to a whole new level of funny. Yeah, the image is do some part of the job, but the words kinda bring it to the next level. So in the next let, next steps, if you're going digital, something to consider is creating your own font based on your handwriting. That way your letters and punchlines are consistent. There are lessons out there on Skillshare, on how you can do just that. Imagine your own font for you to play with at glyphs, do, and do very variations of n. For this very cartoon project, I created my own font. So I've wanted to do that for a very long time and I was finally able to do it. And it's been, it's been great. I now have what I call the imitation typeface. And unfortunately it's probably very much like Comic Sans. It's not a direct rip off of Comic Sans, but it's my handwrite written version of it. Now we're gonna move on to the tutorial of doing the dialogue. And this should be fairly quick and simple. And I'll show you my method of doing it. Now your method will be different, so keep that in mind. Here's my method for creating dialogue. First, do the cat. And I'm going to make it really easy for myself. Yeah, here's my method for creating dialogue in my cartoon. So what I'm doing is I'm placing my cartoon in an InDesign template. So I've already moved over to InDesign. And as you can see, the name of the cartoon is visual banter. And I'm showing a variety of different things and what I'm gonna do for dialogue in that regard. So I'm gonna come over here and grab a little piece of dialogue. And I'm going to place it here. So I've done that. And I'm gonna change my font to DJ imitation for this. And as you can tell, there's only a number of glyphs. They're all capitalized. So then I'm going to move in and I'm going to, I didn't create any punctuation, so I'm going to have to use a different font for punctuation. I need to add the glyphs and for punctuation for this. And include that's different as part of what's going on here. And then once I do that, I've pumped up the font size to make it even more visible. And then I'm going to draw an ellipse and send it to the back and then bring it forward to some. Okay. So we got that and then I'm going to add in to the that's different. I'm going to add in the pen tool to have the little pointy part of the lips are knowing this case. He's thinking, he's not really saying it out loud. And so I've drawn the little thought bubbles. And then I export it and that's pretty much it in creating the dialogue for this cartoon. Now you can use just regular lettering. I'm using other, um, applications. Or you can do the analog lettering in your sketch pad as well. And I've done that before as well. And that one is you definitely need to do it in pencil first to make sure that you're not messing up and not leaving enough space for your lettering. Unless you were hugely come. Unless you're very confident that you know exactly how to space your dialogue. So that's pretty much it. That's how to create a single panel cartoon. And congratulations, you are done, you have finished. You have created that single panel cartoon. And we're gonna come in with lesson number ten for a little bit of extra stuff and we'll move on from there. And I don't think I've really thought through the final lesson and the conclusion of this course. But there you go, ladies and gentlemen, and we'll be right back with less than ten. 12. Conclusion Advanced Skills Next Steps: Lesson ten, which is advanced concepts. Next steps and review of creating your single panel cartoons. So what's the objective of this lesson? Well, I think part of it is to celebrate your accomplishments. You've done, you have made a single panel. So let's celebrate. Lissa, pull out some applause and give yourself a little pat on the back. You've made it to the end of this set of lessons and you've completed the class. So good times. And next we're going to next objective of course, is to review briefly what we've learned and also find out what are the next steps after you create your single panel cartoons. So good times. You did it despite incredible odds, you created a single panel cartoon. I wasn't even sure that you could do it. I had numerous doubts, but here we are. You have something you can put on your refrigerator or tape to the rear view mirror when you are stuck in traffic. So now we've got a single panel cartoon review coming at you. And I just wanted to go over some of the things that you have learned during this course. We're not going to get into any detail. This is just summary of what you have learned. And you should be celebrating because you've gone through a lot. You've learned some stuff, hopefully that you've, hopefully you've come, you've created your own process and that you're ready to move on to the next step. So what have you learned in recreating a single panel cartoons while you've developed an overall concept for the cartoon and create a recurring characters. Whenever the setting and background of the characters, you brainstorm the first idea of the cartoon strip or our cartoon panel, created a variety of layouts based on the ideas for that cartoon. You sketch the first idea, you ink sketch, you colored the inking. You added shading to the cartoon. And finally, you add a dialogue and captions to your cartoon. Now it goes without saying that the process becomes easier the more you do it. And yet here I just said it. So still this is a milestone. This is your first cartoon or just a refresher. Be mindful of this moment. This could be the start of something awesome. So don't keep this cartoon to yourself. Place a cartoon in the project folder so that we can review it and get a good laugh. You've brought humor into the world. And n like n as some comments and critiques to others cartoons throughout this. But keep the critiques constructive place. Looking over your work. What do you think needs improvement? What have you learned from this class? What more would you like to learn? Ideas for sharing and publishing social media newsletters, email list, Twitter, Tumblr, instagram, maybe even Facebook. You can share your cartoon in numerous places, maybe even find a web comic kind of area and share it there. Finally, some further resources. I would check out the luminous books if you want to know more about drawing. But specifically, the fun with a pencil is a good one. And so as cartooning the head and figure, I forget who created that one, but that was one of the first books that I got as a kid back in the '70s and '80s. Also find some books, have your favorite cartoonists and maybe a few others, and see if you can get some ideas from that. Move on from there. So those are your advanced concepts. So what's next? Well, I got a couple of challenges for you. Some things to think about and maybe do. And you can include these in the project folder as well if you really want to create TIN cartoons. And if you're stuck for prompts, look up October and see if any of those ideas call to you. Another thing you may want to do is explore the idea of creating a cartoon strip with recurring characters. So if you've already created a recurring character for this panel, you might want to move on to the next level and that is create a cartoon strip. I want to say next level, it's more of a parallel kind of thing to do. Or if you want to, you can animate now that you've gotten your character down, maybe animate them next. Or you can do an audio version of your cartoon in addition to the regular readable version that is removed for the caption. And then instead includes your voice into the cartoon and do it like that. Maybe even create a YouTube video, a very short one with your cartoon character in it. So there's some hands-on ideas. What you might want, might want to do. Some things to consider. This is like a final, some final prompts to leave you with. So these are some great cartoon ideas, at least in my opinion. You've got the worst food ever. Movie lines will never hear. I heard this. There's a cure for boredom and that is the poetry of filling the unlikely character that would create poetry and then create a poem based on that. Apps on your phone. We would like to see an SI, artificial not so intelligence and social media for filling the odd group here and show what type of social media they have. So those are some great ideas to consider for future cartoons. Now if you're really into series, into next steps, I say liquid it takes to get your cartoon published in different places. Whether it's newspapers, digital comics, your own social media, or in various other spaces. You can check out different avenues of beginning your professional career or side gig as a cartoonists. And there you go, everybody that was less than ten. We're all done. We've created a single panel cartoon. And that was the advanced concepts and next steps as well as review. And I hope you've enjoyed this course. Please leave any comments at the end of it. Maybe say it's two TL DR or whatever you wanna do to tell me. And I'd love to hear from you and catch you on the flip side. And hopefully you've had a great experience with this course. I'm creating a single panel cartoon. Thank you.