How to Draw Cartoon Santa

We all love Santa Clause with his Christmas presents and gifts, yet when it comes to drawing cartoon Santa not everyone is so much in for the excitement. The main difficulty most people experience in trying to create Santa cartoons is that they don't know where to start or what kind of costume details to pay attention to.

Fortunately, drawing Santa Claus is actually quite easy once you nail down some of the basic steps. So hopefully this article will help answer questions beginners might have when learning how to draw cartoon Santa.

Step 1. Santa Face

Remember his long white curly beard? And those big mustache that look like the shape of tree leaves? How about his nose? Simple, for a cartoon drawing, it can just be simple circle or oval shape if you prefer. Color it with soft pink, as Santa Clause always seems to have a swollen nose because of freezing winter cold. For the eyes just create two circular dots and it's all done.

Step 2. Santa Hat

This part is super easy. First draw the fur part that sits on Santa's head - draft a rectangular shape and then simply round up the corners to depict its softness. After that you can add a curly triangle with a circular shape on its end.

Step 3. Draw Body

Now you probably know well how big Santa Clause is! So draw this part of cartoon Santa with fairly smooth curly lines, just like you would drawing soft toys. Simplify as many details as you like.

Step 4. Legs and Boots

The easiest position to draw Santa's leg is when he stands straight up. All you have to draw are just two rounded corner triangles that have their pointy angles facing down. To sketch the boots, draft very lightly with your pencil two vertical rectangles and two circles by their sides. Connect these shapes with smooth outlines and you're good to move on.

Step 5. Gift Bag

You can really make you cartoon Santa carry a huge gift bag, almost the size of Santa Claus himself! This can be drawn using yet another simple circle or oval shape from the back of our Santa cartoon drawing. To make it look like as if he is really carrying it, pull the lines of the bag to go over his shoulders and connected to one of his hands.

Step 6. Drawing the Arms

As mentioned above, a cartoonish drawing can be very simple. The arms are where people particularly tend to overdo. If you just imagine them as big fat 'V' letters, then you got it. The gloves can be simplified to minimal as well to circular shapes.

Step 7. Adding Accessories

You only need to draw a few things and it will already look like Santa Clause's uniform: soft fur or felt cuffs around the sleeves, coat's center front and bottom edges; black belt below stomach level ; and a yellow square buckle in the middle.

That pretty much wraps up this basic lesson.

Historical Political Cartoons

The first real political cartoons were drawn back in the early 1500's in Germany during Martin Luther's campaign against the excesses of the all-powerful Catholic Church. During this time of upheaval, Martin was looking for a way to use the new printing press to get his message out to the masses. Unfortunately, the "masses" were largely illiterate peasants who had previously relied entirely on Catholic Clergy for all access to the written word. Since the message Luther sought to distribute was inherently against the Church, he knew he needed a different way to reach the common people. The political cartoon was born.

Looking less like our modern cartoons and more like detailed illustrations, these early cartoons made use of familiar characters and stories to appeal to the peasants in a way that they could easily understand. One of these early cartoons shows the scene where Jesus throws the peddlers and hawkers out of the temple, a Bible story that all onlookers would easily recognize. Opposite the Bible scene is another which shows the Pope writing out and selling indulgences to the people. The comparison of the Pope to the hawkers is unmistakable. In this way, Martin could expose people of all classes to his radical and complex ideas in a way that was both simple and entertaining.

The first real use of political cartooning by an American was Benjamin Franklin's 1754 cartoon "Join, or Die." Its image of a snake cut into eight pieces, each of which was marked as one of the eight colonies, was a direct call to all of the British colonies to unite in common cause against the French and Indians and their plans to take over land west of the Appalachians. Later, in 1765, Franklin would again use the cartoon to try to persuade the colonies to unite in order to fight the British for independence. In both cases, the image of the snake became a stark and easily recognizable symbol around which the unity movement could coalesce.

The cartoon medium works well as a way for a new idea to gain a foothold in the public consciousness because of the brief and simple message it conveys. Since many cartoons couch their dissenting ideas in humor or satire, the artist can get away with making a radical idea seem more socially acceptable and less dangerous to the powers that be.

Cartoons continued to have huge importance in American politics during some of the more turbulent times in our nation's history, like the government corruption of the late 1800's, when Thomas Nast drew his famous "Boss" Tweed character to skewer thieving politicians. It was during this time that America's first humor magazine, "Puck," was started, creating a new, larger forum for political cartoons.

During the early 1950s, the term "McCarthyism" was coined by the cartoons of Herblock, one of the first people to publicly question Senator McCarthy's communist witch hunt. Today, political cartoons still entertain and inflame readers of print publications, but perhaps a more modern incarnation of their ability to educate through humor and depictions of the absurd exists in television shows like "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report."

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