This scanned the whole page, which we don’t need, so click on the “Crop” button and the program will guess which parts of your page are important, cutting out everything else. When it finishes, you will see a picture of your scan in the Simple Scan window. The scanner may need a moment to warm up and will make loud mechanical noises for the next minute or two.

Open simple scan and click the “Scan” button. Place your drawing so that it is facing the glass on the scanner, and close the lid. It is easy to use and is already installed on most Linux distributions. For Linux users, I recommend a program called “Simple Scan” for this step. If you don’t have a scanner, you could take a photograph of your drawing instead, but scanning is easier and looks nicer. If you can easily lift the top of the printer and see some of the guts through a piece of glass, then your printer is also a scanner. A scanner would be perfect, and it is likely that your printer has one built into it. Once you have a picture that you want to work with, we’ll need some way of getting that on your computer. That’s how I made the cartoon version of Unique ID. You could also use a photograph instead of a drawing. If you can’t seem to draw something that you are happy with, take a break and try again later.

Don’t be discouraged if your drawing doesn’t look right at first. It might be fun to draw a pet or a monster. I decided to draw myself, but you could draw anything you want. We’ll be using a free and open source program called Inkscape to achieve the effect, but first we need to break out an old fashioned pencil and paper to do a few sketches. This technique can be used to transform any boring picture into a luscious, colorful cartoon.

Today I want to teach you how to make the stylish cartoon character drawings you see on the Hello World Program website.

Inkscape crop photo