Cartoon Ear Formulas

Out of all the features on the head, ears are treated most like an afterthought.  I know that I ignored them for most of my drawing career. It's rare when anyone really pays too much attention to a drawing of an ear, unless it's just down right terrible.

It doesn't really help that cartoon ears are almost error proof. You can almost draw anything, call it an ear and you're done.

When it comes to drawing more naturalistic cartoon ears, you can get away with knowing pretty much nothing about ear anatomy and end up with  a good drawing of an ear. Because of this, I won't breakdown an ear anatomically in this lesson.  But what I will do is give your some compound form formulas you can use to draw a solid looking three dimensional looking ear on a naturalistic cartoon head.

I will also show you some simple details to use when drawing in Freddy Moore, Bruce Timm and Takahiro Kimura styles which you can draw on the formula. However, before I do, let's take a look at some simple cartoon ears.

Simple Cartoon Ears

Here are some examples of common cartoon ears.  These are the simplest kind of ears you can draw:

This is not an exhaustive example.  You can find more by looking at other cartoons and you can even make up your own.

Naturalistic Cartoon Ear Formula

If you want to draw something that looks just a bit more natural and a bit less cartoony, the formula below ought to help:

That's basically it.  With this you can add any style on top and you can get a decent looking, naturalistic, cartoon ear.

Ear Styles

Let's take a look at the formula in action.  We take the D shaped wedge formula, then we add three different styles to it:

And for the sake of completion, let's take do a turn around of all the head types:

Freddy Moore:

Bruce Timm:

Takahiro Kimura Anime:

That's the ear formula.