If you're a beginner at art, and you are interested in drawing people, then learning drawing people is a possible first step to take.

Cartoons won't really give you a realistic looking image of a human being, but they will give you the foundation of drawing out the structure of a human shape, and it will be more fun than more traditional exercises.

Especially when learning how to draw people, starting with cartoons can make it an easier transition.

Learning to draw cartoons of people is often easier than drawing animal cartoons, because people essentially have the same basic shape and structure.

Animals have a wide range of shapes and sizes, and while some might be simpler than others, there isn't much about animal shapes that is universal. But when you draw people, there is the standard oval shape for a head, rectangles for legs and arms, and of course the same balance of two arms and two legs.

When you start learning how to draw cartoons of people, it's often best just to start with structure and focus your energies on drawing stick people. This sounds overly simple, because after all who hasn't drawn hundreds of stick figures before?

But the point of this exercise is to concentrate on the drawing practice of keeping the image symmetrical and to maintain proper proportions. Add simple circles and ovals for hands and feet as you continue to work on this skill.

The next step when drawing cartoons of people is to go beyond rounded stick figures. This means really looking at the human shape and at all the bones there are in our bodies, specifically in the arms and legs.

To draw cartoons you need to look at the joints in our arms and legs and make the necessary bends to the structure of your stick figure. Add rectangles to fill out the thinness of your stick drawing and with a little detail in clothes and the face, you'll have created a simple cartoon person.

If you consider yourself to be a serious artist, then learning how to draw cartoons might not be for you. But if you are a beginner looking for drawing practice and who wants to have fun as you draw, and gain some necessary skills required for drawing any type of image, then you might find drawing cartoons to be useful.

If you start with cartoons, then you can learn the foundation of creating realistic objects by getting the hang of symmetry and proportions, and learning how the body actually looks.

People who are interested in learning how to draw will often start with simple images. Often this leads to the desire to draw pictures, even though they are not always easy to draw.

Some animals have simple structures and lend themselves well to being drawn, but there is such a wide variety of animals that will be more difficult than others. If you use shapes only, then you can learn how different animals are put together and gain a strong understanding of how many animals are built.

If you draw different animals with standard shapes, like squares, triangles, rectangles, dots, etc., which are all arranged in different ways to create body parts and features, then you will have an easier time drawing.

This can be good drawing technique, although it may seem a bit juvenile, because it gives you a simple technique for assembling different sections of different animals. With practice, you will come to understand the shape of each animal that you draw, and how each section is put together.

Using shapes when drawing animals will not create realistic pictures, but it will give you a result similar to animation characters or cartoons. If this is your area of interest, then that is all that you need.

Artist Ed Emberley has published many books that show a number of different ways to draw common animals using nothing more than a handful of different shapes. His books are basically drawing tutorials for kids but they can help a more serious beginner to gain a structural knowledge of drawing.

After you have spent some time just using shapes to draw animals, you should next focus on adding a sense of realism to the animals that you have drawn. This can be done by erasing any lines that indicate a separate shape, and producing an image with a single line that connects to itself.

This is an easy process to learn art, by starting with the building blocks of an image and then erasing the parts that are no longer needed to support the structure and design of the animal. This is something that is done by most people when they draw both inanimate and animate objects.

If you are interested in learning how to draw animals, then you have a number of ways to learn, but drawing through the use of standard shapes is one effective and fun method.

It can be good drawing technique to restrict yourself to a certain process, and after you have finished with the simple shapes, you can move on with the knowledge of how animals are put together.

If you're serious about wanting to learn to draw and paint, then this is an easy and fun way to begin.