Drawing Tutorial: basic shapes in children's illustration

Learn the keys to drawing characters in Procreate through basic shapes, with Jimena S. Sarquiz

Although there is a lot of creativity and imagination behind artistic creations, it is also true that creative people have been developing formulas to facilitate their production process. In illustration, the basic figures – circles, squares, triangles, among many others – play a very important role in determining the bases of a character, of a scene.

Illustrator Jimena S. Sarquiz, creator of the monitosbonitos project (@monitosbonitos), has children's editorial illustration projects for clients such as Editorial Norma, Edebé, Santillana, Macmillan Education, Cambridge University Press or Editorial Televisa. She teaches us simple proportion tips, as well as how to transform basic shapes into characters for your creations. Discover more in the video:

4 steps to convert basic shapes into characters with Procreate

1. Prepare your work area

Select a new project and add a drawing guide in Settings > Canvas. Next, in Edit, change the size, opacity or color of the grid according to your tastes. Using a grid, Jimena teaches, can be very useful to help you clearly delimit the strokes of your drawing.

2. Remember some basic rules

There are some basic tricks for drawing characters from certain proportions. For example: a body is equivalent to the size of seven heads one above the other. To duplicate a circle, swipe the screen to the right, open the menu and choose the option to reproduce this geometric shape.

The first "head" (i.e. the first circle) will be the head itself. The next three can be the torso and the hips; and the last three, the legs.

3. Subvert the rules

According to Jimena, it is interesting to know the rules of basic proportions just to be able to do without them and give wings to your imagination. A shorter or chubby character, for example, might not obey the "classic" shapes. Try varying the sizes of the three parts – head, torso and legs – and you will see how your character sketch changes completely!

4. Try different geometric and nature shapes

Try to transform circles, squares, triangles and other basic geometric shapes into parts of a body or itself into inspiration for the character's own format. Also, use other forms of nature – certain fruits, a peanut, whatever your imagination allows – and you will see how other, even more unexpected ideas will emerge.

An inverted bell becomes the chest of a strong man or the body of a chubby man. It can also be the hair of a slender young lady or the face of a dog. There are no limits to experimentation.

Did you like these tips? Remember that you can learn with Jimena S. Sarquiz to tell stories and transmit emotions through illustration in her course 'Creating characters for children's stories with Procreate'.

You might also be interested in:

- Illustration techniques for children's narrative, a course by Estelí Meza
- Creation of an illustrated folding book, a course by Roger Ycaza
- Illustration to the illustrated album, a course by Ricardo López Iglesias