A little bit of Hollywood came to Riverbank over the weekend, making a stop at the local branch of the library, to teach youngsters, and even their parents, a little about creating cartoon and comic book characters.

Southern California artist and freelance illustrator Carlos Nieto III presented a class called Anime Your Way where he taught youngsters, along with parents, how to create their own cartoon characters.

Among his many projects, he said, included three years as an artist working on ‘The Simpsons,’ an animated broadcast TV program.

Nieto showed his students how to draw a circle using a CD as a tracing tool, then add a straight line down the middle as the framework for creating a face for their character. He used a white board and dry erase markers to quickly draw and modify lines in his art example.

He showed techniques for adding a jaw line, nose, mouth and eyes. Then he showed them how to modify their sketches to create expressions for their face by merely adjusting angles and shapes of the components.

Based in Southern California, Nieto makes his presentation many times a year throughout the west.

Before teaching at the Riverbank Branch of the Stanislaus County Library on Saturday afternoon, May 18, he was at the library in Turlock that morning. On Monday, he was going to a library in Stockton, then to Las Vegas and Arizona this coming weekend.

Mostly a self-taught artist who specializes in Anime, comics and illustration, Nieto said he is working on his debut graphic novel, “La Calavera.”