Drawing Cartoons

I thought I would make a short post about how I make the little characters on Lost Seed. It's actually pretty simple so if you are curious here's how I do it.

1. I make a few doodles on paper, symetrical sides don't matter since you can fix that on the computer. Scan it, lighten it up, here's what I came up with: (I was making a Jesus cartoon, I don't know If I'll use it for the site).

2. I place the drawing in a Vector program such as Adobe Illustrator or InkScape. I make shapes to match the drawing. Mostly using the pen tool and adding anchors to shapes to get a desired result, but I try to keep it simple.

3. The final part is the coloring and shading, I have a very hard time with colors and find myself changing them later down the road. I like using a gradient for the bottom shape, then drawing areas where shading would look good and do a transparent effect over that spot to give it some shadow.

End. That's how I do the cartoons here. It looks like it goes by really fast in from this quick post. I actually take a super long time to make something that I actually use.