Pencil Sketches and Final Color Composition

The above pencil sketches are created for my blog Santa Cartoons. I am not posting here the final composition of colored cartoon (for the shake of avoiding repetition.). After going through the following description you can View Here the completed colored Cartoon.

Every artist has his own way of creating colored/black and white graphics/cartoons in their favorite graphic editors. Just I wanted to share the tip here.

When I feel the composition of any cartoon is going to be very complicated than I go for creating rough sketches of elements in the cartoon on separate sheet of papers.

First I created Santa cartoon character creating his own portrait on canvas. Later I thought of adding a dog, girl and boy. Drawing these characters directly in front of Santa Cartoon Character will mess new pencil lines with previously drawn lines and increase frequency of erasing process.

After inking. scanning and coloring , placed the graphics on differen layers. I tried three compositions by moving movable characters (Dog, Girl and Boy) to different locations. Those combinations are:

(1) Girl and Boy extreme right hand side both viewing at canvas board and dog in the middle.

(2) Girl and boy extreme left hand side watching canvas and dog extreme right hand side facing towards canvas.

(3) Dog extreme left hand side followed by girl (viewing canvas) and boy extreme right hand side (viewing canvas).

I also tried some other placements but I felt the third combination was the best composition. You can flip the characters and increase/decrease the character sizes to match (proportionate) with main (Santa) drawing. That is power of the graphics placed on layers.

Advantages of this process:

(1) Character modification is easy without disturbing background.
(2) Individual characters can be used in other composition.

Please click on image to view enlarged image.

Click Here to view final colored composition Here.

________________________________________________________

Comments by Eli:

I like your characters, especially Santa and snake! I'm thinking the final composition could be a little tighter though if you moved everything to the left and then put the dog in front instead of to the side, right now it seems all the action is heavy on the right side. Just me being a composition freak, the old art teacher coming out. Thanks for your comments on my blog, if you ever have any constructive crits I'd love to hear them!

Thanks Eli for your kind suggestion about composition. I made a new post at Santa Cartoons with your suggestions implemented. Please click here to view changes.