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Photography of Alvaro Montoro being a doofus
Alvaro Montoro

Command Line Lover

cartoon character wearing a baseball cap

Cartoon character in HTML and CSS

css html showdev codepen

Today I completed a new cartoon in HTML and CSS:

It started as many of my CSS drawings, without knowing exactly what it was going to be. I wanted to practice background-shadows, positioning, and sizes and that's how I started... but soon I moved away from them...

Some things I liked/disliked about this drawing:

  • Playing with the border-width: browsers will adjust the width of rounded borders so there are no jumps in the connections. This makes it cool to adjust the widths to give a more cartoony effect than just having a same-width border. You can see it in the chin, ear, or nose.
  • I wanted to play with the background-images to draw the eyes, maybe the nose and the mouth... but it ended up being a bit more complicated than I initially expected.
  • I can't get to draw a proper baseball cap (or a cap in general). It always looks like it's sideways. Need to look into pictures and try to make it more "realistic" (or as realistic as possible for a cartoon.)
  • The shadows and details: I really liked completing the shadows and beard. It got me to practice the box-shadows after "failing" with the eyes, and I'm kind of happy with the results.

And a time-lapse video of how it was done:

It was not on purpose, and it may only be me, but it kind of reminds me of Chris Coyier (kind of...)


I tried to do a better baseball cap and here is the result. Not perfect, but looking better:

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