Today creating a cartoon is much easier than before the age of today's computers and software.  Here is a way to start drawing animated cartoons right away. 

To get started you need two things:  Toon Boom Studio (an animation software program that is basically THE 2d animation software now), and a Genius computer tablet and pen for drawing with. 

Once you have it all installed, here is a quick start guide to get you going:

Above: An overview of a simple Toon Boom Project.

Open Toon Boom Studio and select File -> New Project.  You'll be presented with a menu for a project name, resolution and frame rate.  Since everything is going High Definition now, type in 1920 x 1080 into the resolution boxes.  Your frame rate is how fast pictures will show one after the other. 

A faster frame rate makes movement look smoother.  If you will be playing it back on television, your fastest frame rate in the U.S. and Japan (NTSC) will be 30 frames per second and in England and South Africa (PAL) 25.  Not everything needs to be that smooth though;  panning or scrolling backgrounds usually need to be at maximum frame rate for the motion to look smooth, but ordinarily you will get a way with having a frame rate of anything from half that to a third of that for your normal character movements, which cuts your drawing work in half or more. 

Once the workspace is open, take note of the following windows and tabs: 

• A panel with your tools for drawing and coloring etc. 

• The Timeline with every element on a timeline

• usually tabbed together Color Palette, Pen, Exposure sheet (ToonBoom is completely customizable so these can be anywhere on the screen and moved to anywhere) . 

These are what you will be using most.  

Choose a color from the Color Palette Tab and select your pen thickness etc. from the Pen Tab. 

Select the Brush from your tools panel:

Now you are ready to draw.  

First, select Camera View by clicking the button circled in this picture:

Selecting the camera view means that what you see in the brown rectangle in the main work area is what your camera sees and what will be in your animation.  So all you need do is draw and arrange inside this rectangle as you want things to be, and that is what you'll see in your exported video.

To zoom in and out, simply click any area to select it and press Z or X on your keyboard. 

In the camera view rectangle, start by drawing a background that covers all of the rectangle.  You will see that in your Exposure Sheet Tab there appeared the word "Drawing" and a number.  The Exposure sheet is like a timeline that is listed vertically.  Every following frame of an element is listed as a new drawing below the previous one.

RIGHT CLICK on this little "Drawing" block in the exposure sheet and you will see a menu to extend the exposure (you can also click on the little Drawing block's lower line to see if you can drag it down to create more exposure in the blocks below it).  We're going to add a moving character on this background, and this background will have to stay on screen behind the character, hence the longer "exposure".  For now just pick any number of frames; you can delete the unnecessary frames later.  

We're going to add a moving character on this background now.  Click here to continue...