Making Large Cartoons on Plywood

Recently I've been working on making my cartoons larger. My current sketchbook has a spread of 14 inches wide and 10 inches tall. It's fun and a different challenge drawing on a small sketchpad, but I want to make stuff that's big.

These are two cartoons I made that are hanging on nails in plywood. The orange guy is 48×30 inches and the black and white guy is 40×33 inches.

I make these because it's satisfying work. It's work that humans are meant to do.

How I make them:

A lot of these characters are drawn and cut out already. I take a picture of the small version of it, bring it into Photoshop, cut out the shape, and put on a red background. I send the image to a projector which projects on a piece of plywood I got from Home Depot. I trace the outline of the character with a white paint marker.

Then I paint in the outline on the board with white primer.

Then I paint him in with acrylic paint. In this case because it's B+W I just used the primer as the white and I only needed to paint in the outlines.

After that I clamp him to a table and use a jigsaw to cut him out.

After that I sand the edges to smooth out the piece, and then apply another layer of black to the sides to give it more gravitas.

Process improvements

I've thought about changing the process to use a CNC machine because I want to learn how to use one, but it would take a lot of the craftsmanship away. Here I work so closely with the silhouette of my character which is what I'm really working with. The CNC would "clean it up" but the silhouette already uses a messy, imprecise style. I think I should play into that stylistically, but using a CNC would be way faster and get me cleaner cuts.

I also need a dremel to sand/smooth the harder to reach parts of the characters – my sander doesn't fit in between fingers / other tight spots.