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Step one
Start with a circle for the head and a vertical line to indicate both the spine and the line of motion. Weenie's sort of a shy, insecure kind of boy, so his line is a bit curved, unsure of itself.
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Step two
Put down some circles to indicate shoulders, elbows, knees, hips, and other joints, as well as the hands and feet. I also put in some lines to indicate the arms and legs and I also added a few lines to show the placement of the rib cage. For this version of Weenie, I decided to have him standing awkwardly with his hands in his pockets, looking timid as usual.
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Step three
Outline the arms and legs and give Weenie some semicircular ears on the sides of his head. Then add some eyes in the face just above the horizontal guideline.
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Step four
Add some clothes on top of Weenie's body, a basic T-shirt and jeans with folds around the knees, and then add some details in the shoes, including laces and soles. Then give Weenie some hair: a small part on the left and then a big sweep over the rest of his head that ends just above his eyes. Then finish up Weenie's face with a semicircular nose, eyebrows, and mouth. He sure looks nervous, doesn't he? He's probably standing right outside the principal's office.
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Step five
Put in some finishing details, including lines to show how the hair flows over Weenie's head, and something to put on his T-shirt. I decided to put that obnoxious green sphere sticking its tongue out that you may remember from Douglas Adams' classic novel, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Weenie's the kind of geek who's into that sort of stuff. (Hey, so am I!)
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Step six
It's inking time! Use a felt-tip pen to put dark outlines around all the parts of the cartoon you want to keep in the final version. This is actually an art in itself and there are many techniques you can use in this step. I usually use a cheap Sharpie or Uni-Ball elite to make my dark marks, but professional cartoonists often use dip pens with metal tips and watercolor brushes with India ink.
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Step seven
Use a kneaded rubber eraser to clean up the pencil marks and leave you with a crisp black and white image ideal for scanning. You could scan it in as a "bitmap" image, but I prefer to scan it as a grayscale picture and then use levels to bring it down to pure black and white. Then I make it a bitmap image by choosing bitmap from the mode submenu in the image menu. Then pick the 50% threshold option. You tend to get fewer residual marks that way.
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Step eight
Time for coloring! Use the pencil tool in Photoshop with "Darken" mode to color underneath the black lines and then fill in the rest with the paint bucket. Weenie's always had brown hair, but I've never been able to find a consistent color scheme for the rest of him. This time I was feeling ambitious and gave him a gold and blue shirt.
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