Basics of Character Design

Today i'm write about creating characters and bringing them to life. Character creation includes a number of technical tasks, such as modeling, texturing, and rigging, all of which will be covered later. Before you start building a character, however, you'll need to design it.

Design is about making choices, both artistic and technical. It means getting to know your character's personality and then making choices that communicate this personality visually. When designing, you need to make decisions about size, shape, color, texture, clothing, and many other attributes. There is also a technical aspect to character design: well-designed characters are easy to animate, making the animator's job easier and more creative.

Good character design is one of the cornerstones of good animation. Designing your characters properly will make their personalities jump off the screen. Your audience will know who your characters are immediatelyand like them. When you pair a great design with a great personality, the results can be wonderful.

Lets watch Lat Kampung Boy

Kampung Boy :Kampung Boy is a favorite of millions of readers in Southeast Asia. With masterful economy worthy of Charles Schultz, Lat recounts the life of Mat, a Muslim boy growing up in rural Malaysia in the 1950s: his adventures...

kampong boy part 1:



Mat lives with a younger sister, Ana and his parents Yob (dad) and Yah (mom). Opah is Mat's superwoman paternal grandmother, always at hand to offer good words of wisdom. Opah has a close friend in Pak Din, a village elder who is also grandfather to Mat's heart-throb, Normah.

kampung boy part 2:



Set in a rural "kampung" (village) in Malaysia, Kampung Boy is a two-season animated series about a young Malaysian boy, "Mat" (pronounced as "Mutt") and his two boy-buddies "Tak" (pronounced as "Tuck") and "Bo". Mat is a naive and somewhat mischievous boy, while Bo is the bright one and Tak, well, a self-proclaimed genius.

kampung boy part 3:




Yob (Mat's dad) is a half-baked inventor, conjuring up devices which are neither necessary nor worthy of any use. Yah, his wife however, is a well-mannered, calm and motherly woman, always seeing the foolishness of her husband as something neither harmful nor tolerable! The series begins with Normah, Pak Din's orphaned granddaughter, moving to the kampung to live with him. Up till then, Normah was a city girl much used to the modernity of life only found in big cities. Moving to the rural kampung means a lot of getting used to the laid-back, unsophisticated and "hillbilly" lifestyle. She fitted in awkwardly, but with the help of Mat, Ana, Bo and Tak, she soon blended in. Pay special attention to Mrs. Hew, the children's school teacher...

kampung boy part 4:



Kampung Boy showcases lots of real-life ups-and-downs of rural lifestyle in the typical kampung. Dato' Lat, the creator of Kampung Boy, is a very popular cartoonist in Malaysia. His comics appear regularly in Malaysian newspapers, always poking fun at Malaysians, the Malaysian attitude and plain everyday life in Malaysia.

references:
1. Kampung Boy come to frankfurt
2. Interview with Lat
3. Story about lat
4. News about lat

cartoonist on my life...

Let me introduce of my favorite cartoons and cartoonist... The cartoons and inside of the story many, many came with memories and reminiscence me since i kid.

LAT (Mohamed Nor Khalid) is one of the most-read cartoonists in Southeast Asia, and with the continued, widespread reprinting and translating of his cartoons, he is gaining worldwide fame.His annual compilations of his strips into books have been extremely successful with one, Kampung Boy, selling more than 100,000 copies. The first print of 60,000 over copies sold out within four months and it had to be reprinted.


For a country like Malaysia, that response is a big amount. His comics have a very wide range for an audience including children, intellectuals, and politicians who are fansMalaysia's favourite cartoonist Lat (Dato' Mohd Nor bin Khalid) is a household name in Malaysia. His cartoons have been appearing in local papers from as far back as the 1960's, first in Berita Minggu and then in The New Straits Times.
With countless comic books and the successful cartoon series "Kampung Boy" , Lat is one of the most prolific artists in Southeast Asia.In 1998, Lat even undertook a two-month research on race relations across the United States when he was awarded the Eisenhower Exchange Fellowship. Lat was selected as the 25th Malaysian to take part in the Fellowship under its Multi-Nation Programme aimed at fostering international understanding, peace and productivity through the exchange of information.
Lat went to an English school in Ipoh in 1962, where his teacher Moira Hew supported his drawing skills.Mrs. Hew was later immortalized as a best loved characters in Lats cartoons, the lady with the butterfly-rim glasses... When friends in school told me “we saw your drawings in a magazine and knew it was you” then I realized I had something, because I did not even have a signature. I was 15 or 16 years old and, at that age, you don't think about money, you don't think about style ... you just want to draw what you feel like. So when my friends told me that, it made me think...

Some collections of LAT’s cartoons:
1. The Kampung Boy

Let’s take a peek at the books written by Lat.

• Budak Kampung
• The Kampung Boy (1977)
• Lat's Lot (1978)
• With a little bit of Lat (1980)
• Town Boy (1981)
• Lots More Lat (1982)
• Lat and his Lot again (1983)
• It's a Lat, Lat, Lat, Lat World (1985)
• Lat and Gang (1987)
• Lat with a punch ( 988)
• Better Lat than never (1989)
• Mat Som (1989)
• Lat was here (1995)
• Be Serious! Lat
• Better Lat than Never
• Entahlah Mak...
• Kampung Boy: Yesterday and Today
• Keluarga Si Mamat
• Lat as Usual
• Lots of Lat
• Lat 30 years later (1994)
• Lat gets lost (1996)
• Lat at large (1999)

Sketch your cartoon...tips for beginners

Cartooning is not about drawing it is about telling stories,even when you are drawing a single illustration you are telling a story. Cartooning is about expressing your thoughts. And it is your thoughts expressed beautifully through your cartoon characters that make you different from other average cartoon makers.

1. Do not start with computers. I agree I run the risk of sounding backdated. But here I am not opposing usage of computer altogether, no sane person can do that. But for beginners there is no alternative to using paper and pencil.There are various software that help you so much that you can go ahead even without learning how to draw a smooth line. This kind of over dependency on computers from the very beginning always backfires down the road.

2. Nail the fact in your mind that construction of human, animal, cars and most of the things that that we see around us are complex 3d structures though we draw them on paper which is 2D. So when drawing you must mentally analyze your model in terms of 3d shapes like spheres and boxes and not in terms of 2d shapes like circles and rectangles.Also when you draw something from paper (i.e. 2D), look for and find out the 3d shapes that make up the character.
3. Most of the cartoon drawing or figure drawing tutorials always start with some basic 3d shapes and after a number of steps end up in a complete and beautiful figure. This technique is very effective in learning how we can draw complex figures starting with simple shapes. But what I am going to tell you will make your pace of learning even faster. It is in fact very simple way of using the same tutorial. Just a lot more effective.



Article references:
1. ezinearticles.com
2. cartoons drawing course
3. how to sketch
4. here to check this simple tutorial on head drawing

what is a cartoon?

Cartoons created by : Randy Glasbbegen


Defination of cartoon :

The word cartoon has various meanings, based on several very different forms of visual art and illustration. The term has evolved over time.

The original meaning was in fine art, and there cartoon meant a preparatory drawing for a piece of art such as a painting or tapestry.

The somewhat more modern meaning was that of humorous illustrations in magazines and newspapers. Even more recently there are now several contemporary meanings, including creative visual work for print media, for electronic media, and even animated films and animated digital media.

When the word cartoon is applied to print media, it most often refers to a humorous single-panel drawing or gag cartoon, most of which have captions and do not use speech balloons. The word cartoon is not often used to refer to a comic strip.The artists who draw cartoons are known as cartoonists.

References:
1. Wikipedia
2. Cartoon Research Library
3. Punch Cartoon Library