How to Create Cute Art and Pictures

Creating cute works of art can be a very difficult goal, because it is not simply a matter of making the art look good, it is a matter of achieving a very specific emotional reaction. With other reactions failure can be hidden, however failure to create something cute when this was the goal is immediately obvious. Cute art then requires solid draftsmanship, art skills, and a real understanding of what is cute. Generally we all know what is cute when we see it, however this does not mean that we have understanding of what makes something cute, just as with other art forms an understanding has to be obtained of the composition and anatomy rules necessary to created cute art before such art can be created.

Ham Luske one of the nine old men of Disney showed the other Disney artists as they strove for realism that cute is often made easier through line conservations, by having less lines, less external anatomy one would have an easier time of drawing a cute picture. Cute in this case is a reduction and a rounding of what is normally seen. When for example you think of your friends or babies you do not imagine the details in them because your mind takes it out, this effect can occur when actually looking at the child (which is why some people see the baby as being wrinkly while others see it as being cute). In art the artists cannot count on anyone’s brain to take out details they must do it themselves by reducing detail on anything they want to be cute.

Ham Luske also pointed to the rounding of forms, this is what Fred Moore did in order to perfect many of Disney’s cute characters including Mickey. Indeed if you examine many of the greatest creators of cute art you will notice that the forms of their characters are very rounded. Barbara Lavallee’s for example does an excellent job of rounding forms, perhaps to a much more exaggerated degree then many other creators of cute art work. It is this exaggeration in the rounding of forms that has allowed her to get away with excessive patterns in the cloths. Samuel Butcher does much the same thing making his forms rounded and less detailed. His work is interesting however because it translates well to three dimensional objects. It is often difficult to have drawings translate well into such objects, as shown by the attempts and failures to make Curious George a 3D animation. Part of the difficulties those attempting this ran into was flow. Cute art flows together its lines and shapes form well into one another and compose with each other better then other objects. If you look at babies for example you will notice that their enlarged heads are nearer to a golden mean then adult heads. It is not simply their small size that makes babies cute it is how they flow together.

            Examining baby elephants we see in absolute terms that small does not make things cute. Baby elephants after all are fairly large, yet many consider them to be incredibly cute. What makes a baby elephant cute is both the knowledge that they are a baby, and in visual terms that they are compacted much more then older elephants. Typically being more compacted is cute. Examining the proportions of a child again we will see that these being more compacted in nature helps other compacted things to gain cuteness through association.

            Such compactedness is in association with other things, a baby giraffe for example is cute though less compact then many other creatures. However knowing what a giraffe looks like allows us to judge the cuteness of the baby giraffe based on the older giraffes. Further the giraffes flow and method of composition is fairly nice. Emotion and mental associations are however a big part of what makes us think of things as being cute. This is way artists such as Ezra Jack Keats create such wonderfully cute drawings, because their art though not necessarily in keeping with many of the rules so far established as cute have an emotional quality, the are sentimental, reminding us of our childhood, or of childhood in general. An aspect heightened in the illustrations of his book “Snowy Day” by the flat nature of the character.

            Cuteness then is much more of an emotional factor then anything else, though it is a unique one because unlike anger or sorrow it is one which some people cannot truly express in themselves. People don’t feel cute like a baby and then become more cute looking. So what is needed in drawing something cute is both the emotional factors and the structure which allows such emotional factors to be tapped into.

Disney's artistic version fo Winnie the Pooh is one of the most successful works of cute art in the world. Few cartoons elimnate detail as well as this one whcih shrinks the eyes to avoide excesive faceal features. All forms are fairly rounded, because as with many cartoons the characters are based on ovals, circles and the like, only less details are added then in many cartoons.