Webupon

Here are some sites I have found for transforming yourself and your pictures into 3D avatars, cartoons, and much more. Have fun!

1. www.befunky.com  Like the name suggests, it is a very funky place where you can upload your picture and apply cartoon effects to it, from thick water color to stencil to charcoal. They even have a “Warholizer” (named after Andy Warhol, perhaps the most famous painter from the 1960’s, most popular for his painting of a Campbell’s soup can) where they will give you bright colors for that psychedelic effect! You can save your masterpiece to their online community or to your desktop or portable device like phone or flash drive. The best part of this site is that it is completely FREE! That’s right, turn yourself into a cartoon for free. Below is an example of what the picture looks like afterwards (left is the cartoon!).

2. www.meez.com  Here you can create your own 3D avatar and change almost every aspect of their looks from body type to facial hair and eye shape. It is also “free” in the sense that you pay with what they call “coinz” that you earn every month, by referring people, and by signing up for their newsletter, and by just creating a free account with them. I created an account and an avatar in about 20 minutes. They have cool hairstyles as well as contemporary styles and fashion. It has something that everyone would like.

3. http://www.planetcreation.co.uk/createpic This site is a little more generic that I would have liked but nonetheless offers the basics of what you would need to make a cartoon version of yourself. While the selection is noticeably smaller than the others, you can still have fun playing around with it. This site is especially good for kids, since it is simple and user friendly for virtually anyone to use.

4. www.zwinky.com Probably the most popular of the cartooning sites, or at least the most advertised, Zwinky allows you to change your character and save as many as you would like under your user id. The down side is that the site always tries to download the Mywebsearch toolbar into your browser. You can bypass it but it is a little tricky. Overall, if you install it, it is a decent toolbar to use but there are better. The quality of your Zwinky is pretty high because they have such a wide variety of accessories, clothes, and looks for you to choose from.

5. Photoshop can also be used to make a cartoon version of yourself, although this is considerably more time-consuming than the other options above. But hey, if you have some time and the software, why not? I cannot explain the process easier and more detailed than the gentleman that wrote the ehow article at http://www.ehow.com/how_5104521_make-cartoon-yourself-photoshop.html