- Hi, my name is Mike Dougherty.
I'm a storyboard artist on Spongebob Squarepants,
and today I'm going to be showing you how to draw Spongebob.
- I'm ready!
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Are you taking this art class too?
- Okay so the way I start drawing Spongebob,
we'll draw him from the front
to show you the basics.
Basically he's a, all of our characters
on Spongebob are based on shapes,
and Spongebob's shape is basically a rectangle.
And one easy trick
is if you draw your rectangle,
draw a square inside the rectangle.
So you see the square shape?
That's where his face, and his eyes and nose,
all his features are gonna go.
And then this rectangle down here,
that's where his pants and his tie are gonna go.
One thing I do, is I draw a center line
right down the middle, and then I cut the square up
into four even squares.
And that helps me know where to place his eyes,
and where to place his nose.
His nose is gonna go right here in the middle,
and then you can start drawing his features.
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But drawing Spongebob from front is not that interesting.
It's more fun for me to draw him
in an animated action pose.
So, I think I'm gonna draw Spongebob
walking along, maybe he's just left his pineapple
and he's about to go to work at the Krusty Krab.
So, here I am drawing the rectangle again.
And I'm just gonna resize it a little bit, cause...
We're always tweaking our drawings
cause we wanna make sure we get him right.
So, there's our rectangle.
And I've drawn him as a 3D box kind of shape,
so you can see two sides of him.
And then I'm gonna do that trick
where I put the square inside the rectangle.
So here we have our square here.
There's my center line so I know where to draw
his features, and then I'm gonna draw
his eyes right here.
His eyes, the bottoms of his eyes,
touch this line here.
Right in the center here, that's where his nose
is gonna go, and I'm drawing really sketchy
and rough right now.
It's not a finished drawing.
That's how we draw in animation,
we do a really rough sketch, and then we can
go over it with another sheet of paper or a post it note,
and start to finesse it and get it a little more finished.
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I'm gonna throw his, he's got that
Krusty Krab hat, it's just basically a tube.
So everything is shape based.
So if you can draw shapes and you can draw stick figures
you could probably draw Spongebob.
So here's my rough drawing,
it's really rough and sketchy.
And then I'm gonna fade it out a little bit,
so that I can draw on top of it with another layer.
I'm doing this digitally, but you can do this
at home on paper.
So now I'm gonna start to, sort of tighten up
the drawing and make it a little more finished.
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He's got some fingers, he's balling up his fists there.
And I'm gonna draw his nose first,
cause I have to draw his eyes behind the nose.
So it's sometimes easier to draw the thing
that's in front, and then draw
the things that are behind it so that
you don't have to erase later.
And then surprisingly, drawing a circle
is probably the hardest thing to do.
- How's this, Squidward?
- What the?
How the?
A perfect circle?
- That's decent.
Sometimes I'll have to undo it over and over
again until I get the circle that I'm happy with.
That's a nice thing about drawing digitally
on a computer, is you got your undo button
so you can easily correct your mistakes.
But if your at home and just doing it on paper,
you know, you got your good old eraser.
Spongebob, don't forget to draw
nice, big, fat teeth.
The bigger the teeth the funnier he is.
So some of those sponge holes.
Okay.
And then his tie, you know we're going
back to shapes again.
His tie is basically a circle and a diamond.
And then, his little lapels on his collar?
Upside down triangles.
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Little circle on top, then he's got that anchor on his,
the ship's anchor on the front of his hat.
Okay.
Let's give him some legs.
We'll turn that stick into a tube.
His shoe, his shoe is basically
a circle here, and then another circle here.
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Don't forget his freckles.
I like to draw him
running over a surface.
So just putting a little bit of ground under him
makes it look like he's hopping off the ground.
A little shadow, maybe.
That helps indicate that he's above the ground,
he's moving along.
Volume on that spatula.
And there you go!
That's how you draw Spongebob.
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