(bright, lively music) - Welcome to "Cartoon Academy."

I'm Joe Wos.

Thanks for tooning in.

Today, we're gonna visit a quirky character from the South Pole, a penguin.

(penguin chirps) It's a very special kind of penguin.

We're gonna find out what makes him so special in just a minute.

Let's draw.

We're gonna start with the eyes.

It's an oval shape.

There we go.

All right, next to that oval, we have the other eye, which is a letter C backwards.

(gentle, lively music) The pupils are little dots in the eyes, one, and two.

Now for the beak.

Starting from the base of the eye, come out, in, and add add a little dash, down, and up, sort of a letter V shape, and then follow that down, around, and back up.

Now we're gonna add a little bit of depth.

This is called form.

It's a shape that seems three-dimensional.

To do that, we just add a line from the tip of the nose to the base of the eye.

Good!

Now for the shape of the penguin.

There are lots of different kinds of shapes.

There are traditional shapes, like circles, or squares, or triangles, lots of different shapes that I'm sure you know.

But you can use just about any kind of shape for a cartoon.

For the penguin.

I want you to picture a bowling pin.

(bowling pins clatter) Now, we're not gonna quite draw a bowling pin, but keeping that shape in your imagination will help you draw the character.

We're gonna start from a quarter of the way over on this eye.

Come up, down, in slightly, out, and back in with a wing.

(gentle, lively music) Now, for the other side.

We're gonna come down, around, out, and up.

There's that bowling pin shape, see?

Now, we add two lines across, like this, and another wing.

Now let's add the feet.

Out, around, and in, out, around, and in.

Now we're gonna add an interior design.

Interior means inside.

This is exterior, all the lines around the penguin that form the basic chape.

The interior is where we put the design.

We draw a letter V, around and down, and then down and over.

Now we're gonna fill all of this in.

Now, I'm using my black marker, but you could color your penguin purple or blue or orange or yellow, any color at all you want.

It's your drawing, not mine.

So use your imagination and color your penguin whatever color you like.

I'm just drawing a traditional black-and-white penguin.

And don't worry about coloring inside the lines.

Just do your best.

It's okay if you don't color inside the lines perfectly.

(wacky, cartoony music) There we go.

Now, make sure we don't forget this wing here.

I mentioned to you this was a very special penguin.

This penguin is anthropomorphic.

Now, that's a really big word, anthropomorphic.

I'm gonna tell you what it means.

Anthropomorphic basically means animals or characters that act like people.

In some way, they have human traits.

They might have a personality like a human, or they might dress like a human, or do different actions, activities, like a person.

It's a very common thing in cartoons, and it's called anthropomorphism.

So to make our character a little more anthropomorphic, first, we're gonna give him a costume like a human.

Remember, a costume is what a character wears.

So we're gonna give him a little hat, It's a letter m over and over.

And then we draw a little squiggly line out, point, back in, and connect.

There's a little tassel on the end.

If you like, you can add stripes.

(gentle, lively music) Now we're gonna take these two lines here and turn it into a scarf.

Squiggly line out, out, one, two little lines.

And then again, stripes, polka dots, whatever you prefer.

Let's give him a little bit of emotion, of expression, like a person.

We're gonna add some eyebrows and some eyelids.

That's one cool penguin.

Now we're gonna add skates.

We add a line down, out, point, in, and then a letter L on its side.

Down, out, point, in, letter L on its side.

Now, one of my favorite secrets about drawing.

Cartoonists like to hide things on our drawings.

Sometimes, we like to hide our names, and this is a great place to do it, because any scribble will look like shoelaces.

But I'm gonna use my signature, J-O-E W-O-S.

If your name is short enough, you could sign your name there, too, or you could just use part of your name, or any scribbles at all will work just fine.

Now we're gonna add a bit of setting.

Setting tells us where or when our story takes place.

Our story takes place on a pond in the winter.

(gentle, lively music) So we're gonna add a frozen lake, with some ice, and across, and a little snow bank in the background.

Just some snow piled up there.

Good.

I'm gonna show some of the action happening.

We want to show that he's skating on the ice, so we add just a couple lines like this to show some movement, and then, that shows us he's moving very, very fast.

The last thing we're gonna add is a bit of environment.

Environment is all the things sort of happening in the background.

Usually, it's something very simple.

There's some clouds, or maybe the sun, or if it's raining outside, or there's lightning.

In this case, we wanna show that it's wintertime, so we're gonna add some snow.

I'm not gonna draw every single snowflake.

In fact, I'm just drawing a little letter C over and over.

That's just enough to hint at the environment, that it is wintertime.

Remember to sign your name.

Take pride in your work.

And that is your very special anthropomorphic penguin.

I hope you enjoyed learning how to draw it.

Be sure and stay tooned!

(lively music)