Tech Tip: How to create those cute cartoon characters of yourself

By Audra Anders for The Aha! Connection

I’ve always been curious about the cute little “mini me” cartoon emojis that people sometimes send via text.  When my mom (who is in her seventies) sent me a text with a cartoon of herself I realized then and there that I needed to figure this out.  

My oldest son recently taught me how to use Snapchat.  He’s my only Snapchat friend and I’d like to keep it that way.  I mean, who needs yet another way for people to contact them?!    But I digress….when we set up my Snapchat profile we did it quickly and he created a manly stick figure for me that had long brown hair, mirrored sunglasses and a baseball cap.   I had no idea that once I started Snapchatting him that it would create adorable little “mini-me” cartoons to deliver messages without words.   And that, my friends, is how I discovered  Bitmojis.

 Bitmojis are basically personalized cartoon avatars….or…according to Bitmoji:  “your personal emoji”.    Once you create your avatar it works with Facebook, Gmail, text, and pretty much anything that supports “copy” and “paste” functionality.

I scrapped the original “mini me” and started over.  It was so much fun!  Basically, you just need to download the Bitmoji app to get started.  You create an account and then go through several screens choosing your face, eye color, hairstyle, clothing etc.   The choices seem endless and you could get lost in this process for hours if you aren’t careful. 

Once you’ve created the perfect “mini me” you’ll set up the Bitmoji keyboard on your smartphone so that it becomes basically a new keyboard that you can use to send these fun cartoon images of yourself. After you save your first Bitmoji, the Bitmoji app provides instructions for setting up the keyboard.  It’s easy and fun!