Drawing the Better Half: Women in Cartoons

There are loads of examples of how to draw cartoon women... YouTube is full of 'em.  All those tutorials are good and I encourage you to watch them.

As for me, I don't have a "structural strategy" for drawing cartoon women.  Not yet, anyway.

I started with perhaps the most iconic cartoon woman ever created: Tinkerbell from Peter Pan.  Here's the basic rough:

... and here's the clean-up:

I got this pose off the internet.  As I recall... and I do recall seeing Peter Pan when it was first in theatres... I might have been 6... the original Tinkerbell was perhaps more '50s oriented, although this particular pose isn't bad.

In the movie Tink had lots of character.  She got jealous because Peter Pan was directing so much attention to Wendy.  She'd get really p.o.'d and hide.  This particular Tinkerbell in our drawing seems a little too sweet for my recollection.

As you can see, my basic strategy is to keep eyeballing the drawing to gauge that it "looks right."  I also included the gossamer wings but that isn't especially useful to us right now.

Proportion-wise, I could see that our "quarters" rule isn't going to work.  Tink's proportions are more in line with reality... albeit the head is somewhat large... of roughly 4 and a half heads tall:

If we are going to examine an underlying structure, I suppose it would look like this:

... but I'm not much of a structure guy.

For me, Tink was a hard one to draw.  Try it, have some fun with it.