Creating a cartoon or human-like caricature is a fun and rewarding project to do in Illustrator. Not only that, but if you’re pretty good with the pen tool, it doesn’t take very long. In this tutorial I will be creating an elf. Be sure to look at refrences of other cartoons or caricatures to make sure your shapes are correct. To start, I drew a basic head shape.

Then, I added the hat and hair. To remove extra lines, I expanded all the lines and deleted the extras I didn’t need. Sometimes you might have to go to pathfinder and click “Divide” in order to delete extra lines. Just select all your lines, expand, divide, and delete stray lines.

I drew a basic almond-shaped eye, and then copy-pasted, flipped, and rotated it to create 2 unique looking eyes.

The nose and lips are just simple lines I drew with the pen tool. Remember to expand and sometimes divide everything you draw.

I drew the ears separately, then pasted it in the correct location, I expanded, then divided, then deleted the part of the ear that went inside the hair. I pasted the ear again, flipped it, resized it and rotated it. Then I expanded, divided, and deleted extra parts. This process is easy to learn and it is the same for anything you draw.

Since you expand and divide, everything should be on the same layer. Here is my complete “Ink” layer.

Then I went on to my next layer, Fills. I make the fills on a new layer because this will make everything alot easier to edit later on. This is especially important when making a cartoon, since you will probably need several expressions of the face. Make the fill layer below the outline layer, and lock the outlines layer.

Now, just draw the shape of the fill you want to make (here it is the face) and color it. This proccess is easier the thicker your lines are. If you are just beginning with illustrator, make your lines thicker. You can do this even if you expanded your lines. Just add a .5 stroke and it will make all the black a bit thicker.

I added a radial gradient to the cheeks.

More gradients give the cartoon depth. Here is a shadow on the top of the face.

I duplicated my cheek gradients and moved them a bit higher, then made them white instead of pink. This highlights the cheekbones and makes it pop out more.

I added similar white highlights to the nose.

Then I drew around the nose line and added small nostrils (also gradients).

The rest I just drew in vector shapes and applied subtle gradients. I also added shadows on the sides similar to the one at the top of the face.

I added highlights to the eyes with gradients.

The hair can be colored in 2 ways. Here it is done with a simple gradient:

It can also be done with a mesh gradient:

Eyebrows should not be black or too dark. Generally try to make them 2 shades less saturated than the hair.

The lips are just basic vector shapes

The hat is very simple just gradients with a highlight but it could have more detail but I wanted the facial expressions to be the central focus point.

I made a wink easily by just editing a layer above the outlines.

Large Size with wink:

Large Size Original:

Large Size without strokes — just for fun. You can see here that my lines didnt have to be extremely accurate for the cartoon to look smooth.

Tags: Elf, princess, learn to draw, drawing in illustrator , adobe illustrator tutorials, cartoons, cartoon, caricatures,mascots,web mascot