16 Cartoon Character Drawing and Sketching Ideas (With a Reference for Each)
Cartoon characters are built, not doodled at random. Underneath every sketch below is a stack of simple shapes, a decision about which feature to blow out of proportion, and one clear emotion driving the face. Get those three right and the character reads from across the room.
Each of the 16 ideas here is tied to a specific sketch on this page, with a note on what that drawing is teaching you — where the construction sits and what to watch when you copy it. Work down in order for a difficulty curve, or jump to whichever face you like most.
If the faces are what you want to push hardest, the collection of cartoon characters with big eyes works through 25 pencil references and the eye proportions behind each one.
16 Cartoon Character Drawing and Sketching Ideas
1. The Kid With an Oversized Backpack
The pack is bigger than his torso, and that is the whole gag. Draw it first as one fat rounded box, then fit the boy in front — do it the other way round and the pack ends up politely small. The straps sell it: they compress into his shoulder and change direction where they cross the chest.
2. A Tiny Astronaut Floating in Space
Nothing touches the ground, so the pose does all the work. The limbs trail behind the body and no two sit at the same angle. The helmet is a circle drawn over the face, not around it, with a thin highlight arc telling you there is curved glass between you and him.
3. A Rabbit Standing Up With a Carrot
An animal becomes a character the moment it stands up and holds something. The ears carry the personality — one leans, one stays up, and both taper rather than running parallel. The carrot is the only colour on the page, and a single spot of colour in a pencil drawing pulls the eye exactly where you want it.
4. A Skinny Alien Waving Hello
Two enormous domed eyes on a head as wide as the shoulders, then a body like a pipe cleaner. The skin is stippled all over while the eyes stay smooth, and that difference in texture is what makes them look wet. Narrow ankles into broad splayed feet stop a spindly figure from looking like it will tip over.
5. A Boy Reading, With the Story Escaping the Book
One drawing doing two jobs. The boy is tight and finished; the creatures pouring out around him are loose and half-drawn, which reads as imagination rather than a crowd of real monsters. Keep the pressure light above his hairline. To fill that swarm with more oddities, the ugly cartoon character drawing ideas are built for exactly this kind of background chaos.
6. A Lizard Head With Heavy Brows
A reptile has no eyebrows, so the artist drew some anyway — and that single liberty turns a lizard into a character with an opinion. The brows are thick and tilted slightly down, which reads as wary amusement. Everything else stays restrained: a long clean neck, barely any shading, one soft crease at the mouth corner.
7. A Kitten Wrapped in a Blanket
The eyes take up a third of the face and each carries two highlights — a big one at the top, a small bounce light below. That second highlight is what makes them glassy instead of flat. The fur runs in short strokes that change angle as they follow the skull. For more feline structure, the cat drawing ideas work through 62 sketches.
8. A Friendly Little Dinosaur
Pure shape construction: a big egg for the belly, a smaller one for the head, a curve for the tail. The arms are deliberately useless stubs — shrink the limbs and the body reads heavier and more babyish. The speckles cluster along the top of the head and back and thin out underneath, so they double as shading. A good first character for kids, alongside the baby animal sketches.
9. A Cub Holding a Bunch of Daisies
Give a character a prop and you have a story — this one is offering flowers, and the tilt of the head does the shy part. The daisies are drawn with real botanical care while the cub stays soft and simple, so the bouquet does not disappear into the fur. Similar rounded muzzles run through the monkey pencil drawing references.
10. An Owl on a Branch
The most patient drawing here. Feathers go down in overlapping rows like roof tiles, each row smaller up the chest, and the rows curve to follow the barrel of the body rather than sitting flat. Rush that and the owl goes shapeless. The toes wrap right around the branch — feet that merely touch a perch always look pasted on. More of this in the bird sketching ideas.
11. A Creature Peeking Around a Tree
Half the character is hidden and the drawing is stronger for it. The fingers curling around the front of the trunk are the detail that proves the creature is behind the tree and not stuck to it. Bark texture runs heaviest at the edge where the face appears, framing the eyes — and both eyes point hard to one side, which is where the nervousness comes from.
12. A Lanky Pirate With a Skull Hat
Every proportion rule broken at once: huge hat, head too big for it, bulging eyes, ears out sideways, and a neck about as thick as a thumb holding it all up. It works because the exaggerations push the same direction — top-heavy and unstable. That nose is a genre in itself, covered across the cartoon characters with big noses references.
13. A Goldfish With a Startled Face
Fish have no eyebrows and no mouth corners to pull, so surprise comes from the shapes: a perfectly round open mouth, eyes set wide on the sides of the head, fins fanned stiff instead of trailing. The bubbles rise in a loose diagonal that shrinks with distance, which puts the fish underwater without drawing any water.
14. The Same Pirate, Cropped Close
Draw this straight after the last one to see what a tighter crop buys you. The hat brim is now dense crosshatching throwing real shadow over the brow, the stubble is individual flicks rather than a grey wash, and the brows angle down into the nose to make him manic instead of merely cheerful. Same character, more menace, purely from framing and pressure.
15. A Stick Figure With a Balloon
Deliberately the crudest drawing on the page, and it still has more life than a careful one would. Scratchy lines, a wobbling balloon string, two blobs for feet — but the eyes are wide and the grin is enormous, and that is enough. The doodle character ideas build 32 more characters at exactly this level of finish.
16. A Boy in a Cloak With Round Glasses
The hardest one here, because it asks for two skills at once. The face is loose cartoon — huge round lenses with the eyes drawn full size inside them. The cloak is patient pattern work, every fold shaded and the fabric carried around the curve of the shoulder. Costume-first practice like the Disney sketching ideas and the cartoon characters with white hair drawings gets you there faster than drawing faces alone.
The Three Decisions Behind Every Sketch Above
Build on Shapes, Not Outlines
The dinosaur is two eggs. The alien is a dome on a stick. The kitten is a circle inside a soft rectangle of blanket. Block those in lightly before a single feature goes down, then check the silhouette — if you filled the sketch in solid black and could no longer tell what it was, the shapes underneath are too generic.
Exaggerate One Thing, Not Everything
The pirate is the exception that proves the rule: he pushes several features at once, but all in the same top-heavy direction. Most of the others pick a single target — the backpack, the alien’s eyes, the owl’s stare — and leave the rest near normal so the exaggeration has something to measure against. Rounder bodies make this easiest to see, which is why the fat cartoon character drawings are useful practice for stacked mass and compression points.
Vary Your Level of Finish
Look again at the boy with the book, the cub with the daisies, the cloaked wizard. Something is rendered hard and something is left loose, and the contrast decides where your eye lands. A drawing finished evenly everywhere has no focal point. If hair is the part that keeps beating you, the cartoon character with curly hair drawings break clump structure down across 30 examples, and the cartoon star character color pages strip characters back to one repeated shape for a simpler warm-up.
Frequently Asked Questions
What pencil should I use for cartoon sketches like these?
An HB for construction and a 2B or 4B for the darks covers everything on this page. The owl and the cloaked boy need the softer grade to get shadow that deep without grinding the paper. Keep the construction stage light enough to erase cleanly, because you will move things.
Why do my cartoon eyes always look wrong?
Usually the highlights. Draw both eyes as spheres, then put the highlight in the same position on each — top-left on both, or top-right on both. If one sits high and the other low, the character goes cross-eyed however good the shapes are.
How do I stop my characters looking stiff?
Avoid symmetry. In the sketches above, no two limbs sit at the same angle, ears lean differently, and heads tilt off the vertical. Draw one flowing line of action through the whole figure first, then hang the shapes off that line instead of stacking them squarely.
Can I copy these drawings and post them?
Copy them as study all you like — that is what references are for. If you want to share the results publicly, change something real first: a different prop, expression or body type. Learning the mechanics by copying is fine; passing off a straight copy as your own design is not.
Pick three from this list, give yourself ten minutes each, and do not erase anything until all three are down. Speed forces decisions about shape and exaggeration that careful drawing lets you dodge.
