Design character model based on real person

I am fairly new to Blender - have watched lots of videos and worked through some tutorials. I am wanting to work on a short animation project starring my neices and nephew to get my feet wet.

I hope this is the proper section for this thread; I am looking for help with how to go about make some simple cartoonish character models that resemble real people. I would be interested in hearing other artists’ personal methods as well as recommendations of helpful resources.

Being a newbie, I don’t want to aim too high, so my plan is to make some fairly simplistic models, but I want the kids to be able to recognize themselves in these characters.

Thanks!

Doing chartreuse is not really all that simple. It takes some practice. I don’t recommend it.

However you can create pretty good simple character model by using Blender Projection Painting. The model need not be so complex. Creating head model made of just a hint of nose and general shape will do. And, you can simply transfer face photo right onto the model. It looks surprisingly good!

How are you at doing caricatures? What is recognizable in cartoon characters is exaggerated traits. If you aren’t good at caricatures, find a street fair with a caricature artist and get some done for your nieces and nephews and use those as inspiration for your cartoon characters. What I’d recommend, since your interest is animation, is the Animation Toolkit which comes with a pretty flexible character generator. You can probably get close to a recognizable character just playing around with the character generator options, and just model in the exaggerated features from the caricature drawings.