Below you’ll find an easy step-by-step tutorial for how to draw people as cartoons. The key is to keep things simple, simple, simple.

Learning how to draw people as cartoons is a skill that many pros study for years before they feel like they have it mastered. Drawings that look super easy to do, often don’t reflect the hours of practice that it took to get there.

The good news is that cartoon drawing of people is a great topic for elementary students, purely because of all that built-in simplicity. The eyes are either just a few lines, or even dots, the nose a quick gesture, and the mouth could be just a curved line. So easy, and yet something that still conveys so much feeling and expression.

In order to encourage students to come up with their own cartoon characters, this download has many examples of what to draw, starting with a “Cartoon People Ideas” page. There are ideas for creating a character in three steps: the face, hair, and (optional) headwear.

And because you can never have too many ideas, the download comes with two more pages full of ideas for more female and male characters. Long hair, short hair, curly, straight, glasses, no glasses, earmuffs, hat, no hat — hopefully something for everyone to get inspired by, and find fun to draw.