How Do Kids Improve Skills With Easy Cartoon Drawing Practice?

Start small: circles, ovals, stick figures, and a lot of curiosity. I tell kids to treat those shapes like Lego blocks; stack them, stretch them, squish them, and suddenly a character appears. My favorite drill is the 10-minute challenge — pick a silly prompt (a cat astronaut, a sleepy dragon, or a superhero who loves snacks) and draw it three times, each version a little simpler or stranger than the last. I also love the copy-and-change trick: copy a cartoon from a page, then swap the eyes or exaggerate the mouth and redraw. That teaches both observation and invention.

I mix analog and digital: paper sketching builds hand control, while simple drawing apps let kids undo without fear and try color ideas fast. Encourage them to keep a little portfolio — even sticky notes count — and to share only when they want to. Praise the effort more than the result; I’ll point out a steady line or a clearer silhouette before talking about color. Games help too: drawing by number of lines, drawing while listening to music and matching the mood, or creating flipbook animations to feel motion. I still get a kick out of those goofy first attempts; they’re where style begins, and that never stops making me smile.

My sketchbook still smells like crayons and possibility, and that’s exactly the energy I tell kids to chase when they’re learning to draw cartoons.

I start by breaking things down into the tiniest building blocks: circles, ovals, rectangles, and simple lines. I make a little game out of it — pick a favorite character from a TV show or book, then redraw them using only three shapes. Tracing can be a secret weapon here: I encourage tracing over printed line art with tracing paper or a lightbox, then redrawing without tracing to see which bits stuck. Quick gesture sketches (30 seconds to 2 minutes) warm up the hand and loosen the lines, while slow, careful copies help the eye learn proportions. I also love mix-and-match exercises where you cut out eyes, mouths, and hairstyles from magazines or printed templates and recombine them into new goofy faces.

To turn practice into progress, I suggest short, consistent sessions — ten to twenty minutes every day beats a three-hour crash session once a week. Keep a ‘meant-to-be-messy’ page in the sketchbook for experiments, and another page for deliberate practice where you focus on a single feature like eyes or hands. When kids get frustrated, I give creative, small rewards: stickers, a new colored pencil, or permission to make a silly comic strip. I still do these tiny drills myself whenever I feel rusty, and they always remind me that improvement hides inside small, joyful habits.

Simple steps build confidence fast, and I often frame practice like a tiny curriculum that feels more like play.

First, I scaffold skills: tracing and copying for familiarity, then altering what’s copied so children learn to simplify and invent. For example, take a complex character and reduce them to three big shapes; next, change one of those shapes and redraw. I champion repetition with variation — do the same face five times but try different mouths, or draw the same character from three angles. Timed drawing rounds (one minute, three minutes, five minutes) teach kids to prioritize and capture the essence rather than getting stuck on fine detail.

Beyond drills, I mix in storytelling: have the child draw a short comic panel where a character feels angry, happy, and surprised. That builds expression vocabulary. Use simple tools: graphite pencils for value practice, a thick marker for confident linework, and colored pencils for experimenting with palettes. Keep feedback positive and specific: point out what improved and one tiny tweak to try next. I like to set weekly, attainable goals — like mastering three facial expressions — then celebrate them. Watching a kid surprise themselves by drawing something they thought impossible is one of the best parts of this whole process.