If you wish to pursue a career in cartooning but don’t know how to go about it, then going through this article on cartoon courses will leave you with a lively overview of this profession.

Cartooning Courses

Whether your passion lies in penciling comic caricatures or you simply love to fudge figures on paper, creating cartoons is a serious craft that can be developed with strokes of creativity, humor and some improvisation. If your talent lies in translating commonplace characters and incidents into rib-tickling pencil strokes and transforming reality into fanciful mirth through your sketches, then a course in cartooning can help you take your skills to a different level. While formal training is not essential to make it big as a cartoonist, having a Bachelors, Masters or even a Certificate course qualification will help you get a grip of what’s going on in the world of cartooning. Here’s a brief overview on courses in cartooning.

Courses In Cartooning

Course Details

Eligibility

Although it’s not compulsory to have a formal degree in cartooning, most companies prefer to hire people with an associate’s or bachelor’s degree. Thus, anyone willing to pursue a career in cartooning should at least have a basic degree or a certificate of training in the basics in the field. However, a degree course can only be done after graduating from high school. The basic degree curriculum involves courses in graphic art, painting, art foundation, art history, sculpture, drawing, and animation. A master’s degree program, however, uses advanced courses to equip students with the specifics of the trade. One does not need to have an art or animation background or prior experience to qualify for the degree program. Just a basic knack for art, love for sketching and good sense of humor is good enough to help one qualify for the course.

Details Of The Course Curriculum

A certificate course in cartooning provides students with the basic knowledge on:

The techniques
Color and perspective
The art of humor
Cartoon layouts
Figure drawing
Features & expressions
Main joke formats
Character identification
Strip cartoons and caricatures

A bachelor’s degree in cartooning involves a blend of technical and theoretical cartooning courses and offers training on:

Cartooning history
Principles of cartooning
Watercolor techniques
Pastel techniques
Illustration etching

A two years master’s degree program in cartooningoffers students the chance to pursue an advanced program of study in the field and the curriculum includes:

Lettering by hand
Silk screening
Digital cartooning
Figure drawing
Observational drawing

Specialization
Students pursuing a career course in cartooning can also opt for specialized courses in the same. A specialized program is usually one to two years long. Depending on your skills and interests, you can opt for specialized courses in 2D and 3D (2 and 3 dimensional) images, visual arts, technical illustrator, comic illustrator, motion picture and more. Cartoonists today are increasingly betting on computer technology for their work. For this reason, it's important to know and learn software programs and use technical knowledge to create and manipulate art to optimum effect. Students with technical inclination can opt for specialized courses in animation and go for advanced technical courses in character creation, object perspective, animation software and drawing basics.

Skills Required
Becoming a cartoonist is no easy job. Apart from having an artistic knack, a person should have innovativeness, keen observation, a creative streak and an infallible ability to arouse laughter. A cartoonist should have a creative mind, a natural flair for drawing, an eye for detail, an excellent color sense, stamina and lots of patience. A cartoonist should also be a brilliant writer to cook up interesting storylines to complement their caricatures and cartoons.Cartoon artists must have superior sketching abilities and should know how to communicate their ideas effectively. Cartoon artists also need to know how to manage their time efficiently and be self-motivated.

Career Prospects
The profession of a cartoonist is indeed emerging as a lucrative one in recent years. One can choose to work as a political cartoonist or settle into the groove of being a comic strip cartoonist, depending on his/her skills and interest in newspapers and magazines. Career options are open from freelancing for newspapers or magazines to steady employment in advertising agencies and production companies. A cartooning career is very profitable but demands maddening dedication and patience. Following politics, sports and other current issues keeps the brain working like a machine and then a little bit of imagination combined with the humor quotient keeps an artist’s desk busy.

Some of the Best Institutes Offering this Course globally

National Institute of Design (NID, Ahmedabad)
J.J. School of Arts, Mumbai
Global School of Animation & Games, New Delhi
Zee Institute of Creative Arts (ZICA)
Industrial Design Center (IDC), IIT - Mumbai & Guwahati
London Art College
Cartoon courses at The Institute (Formerly Institute Hampstead Garden Suburb), UK
Prince'S Drawing School, UK
Telford College Of Arts And Technology, UK
Macarthur Community College Inc, Sydney
St George & Sutherland Community College, Sydney
The Center For Cartoon Studies,Vermont
Academy of Art University’s Cartoon School

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