How to Draw Cartoons
Tooned Out
A Review of How to Draw Cartoons
by John Butterfield
Christopher Hart, the drawing hand and onscreen guide behind How to Draw Cartoons, has written and drawn a series of printed how-to books for art publishers. A competent pro — OK, a hack — he breaks down cartooning into a series of steps. Follow them and your cartooning may improve. Or at least you’ll have a better grasp of visual cliches. You’ll find the complete text of his book Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Cartooning but Were Afraid to Ask on this CD-ROM. That’s about all you’ll find.
How to Draw Cartoons defines the word “shovelware.” But it’s shovelware with a particularly insulting attitude. Hart and his Macromedia Director-wielding partners in crime toss just enough interactive doodads at the reader (“user” isn’t an apt term here; there’s hardly anything to use) to show that they knew what was possible. They just didn’t care enough to do it right. “Interactivity” on this disk means clicking on a thumbnail of a cartoon and have it increase in size and take over the center of the screen. Then — be still my beating heart — you can click on another thumbnail and have IT increase in size and take over the center of the screen! Gosh, what will they think of next? Oh, let’s not forget Hart himself, who wanders into the frame from time to time — a two-inch tall figure who spouts wisdom such as, “Hair is the most powerful single ornament in changing a character’s identity. Be bold.” Other multimedia touches? Cartoon lightning flashes, and thunder rumbles in the weather section. A few snatches of often-inappropriate music (“Volga Boatman” for a cartoon Viking? “Dixie” for a Wild West cowboy?) play when a few characters appear. And in the end you can choose a few cartoon head shapes, and place a variety of eyes, noses, mouths and hairstyles on them — a pixilized Mr. Potatohead.
So what don’t you get? Virtually everything that one would want on a disk that claims to show you how to draw cartoons. Things like:
Drawing. Nowhere on this disk can the viewer draw a line, or practice a technique gleaned from these electronic pages. Even the simplest of kids’ art programs today manages to include an electronic stylus and some white space for doodling. How can a how-to disk not do the same?
Examples of the creative process. Where are the video clips of Hart actually composing a scene, or working a sketch from rough-in to erasing of guidelines? All we get — when we even get this much — are the initial circles and squares he uses to plan his composition, and the finished drawings. The all-important intervening steps where adjustments are made, details tried and discarded, and roughs shaped into final design, are left to the readers’ imagination.
Original ideas. Hart, a graduate of the Walt Disney animation program at the California Institute of the Arts, former staff artist for Blondie, and contributor to Mad magazine, never met a cartooning cliche he didn’t like. He ticks them off one by one, making them sound like immutable laws of nature rather than what they are — the lazy guy’s way of avoiding original thinking: — “Cartoon hands are different from real hands in that they have three fingers and a thumb.” (Someone forgot to tell that to G.B. Trudeau or Hank Ketcham). — Draw a room for a teen-age girl. “What makes it obvious? The posters and teddy bear.” Like, duh. — “Gorillas should have a stumpy tail; chimps should have a long, skinny tail.” (Ignoring the fact that neither animal has any tail at all). — “Nighttime scenes always have a crescent moon.” To give Hart his due, his quick explanation of action lines, visual effects and layout techniques can help beginning cartoonists learn some shortcuts that will add variety and polish into their work. But Hart won’t, or can’t teach the beginner how to draw.
And neither will this CD-ROM, which is nothing more than a series of static pages with some rudimentary movement and a few cliched sound effects tossed in. It’s the “Clutch Cargo” of the multimedia world. If there’s a budding cartoonist in your family, don’t let them waste time in front of the computer screen with this disk, searching for a nugget of cartooning creativity that never turns up. Instead, sit your would-be Charles Schulz down at the table with a cupful of sharpened No. 2s, a top-quality eraser and a thick stack of clean white paper. You might even give them a printed edition of one of Hart’s how-to manuals (he does, after all, provide some useful tips). Then they can learn firsthand the most important – and perhaps the only — rule that every cartoonist needs to learn: that the only way to learn how to draw cartoons is to draw cartoons. It doesn’t take a computer to learn that. Watch them learn.
Multimedia Cafe Scorecard
| Product: | How to Draw Cartoons |
| Company: | DiAMAR Interactive Corp. |
| Cost: | $39.95 |
System Requirements:
Macintosh: 25 MHz 68030-based Macintosh or greater (accelerated for Power Macintosh); System 7.1 or greater; CD-ROM drive (double-speed or faster); 8MB RAM and 2MB available hard drive space; 256-color (8-bit) monitor, at least 640 x 480 pixels (13-inch)
Windows: 33 MHz 386SX processor or higher; Microsoft Windows 3.1 with DOS 5.0 or higher (Windows 95 compatible); Windows-compatible double-speed CD-ROM drive (or faster) and sound card; 8MB RAM and 4MB available hard drive space; 256-color monitor, at least 640 x 480 pixels (13-inch).
Breakdown:
Entertainment Value 2
Educational Value 3
Concept 2
Depth 2
Interface 3
Overall Score:
(* 0 rating, 0 votes)
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