How to Draw Anime Bodies
Full Answer
Beginner Guide to Drawing Anime & Manga
Add clothing to your anime drawing to give your character personality .
When you’re learning how to draw anime lips, eyebrows, or other specific facial features, it’s helpful to have focused instruction—and noses are no exception! In this course, Skillshare instructor Leon F. Andersen teaches you how to draw noses with varying degrees of detail .
Skillshare instructor Sensei’s course is a great masterclass in anime faces. If you’re learning how to draw anime for beginners, Sensei’s advice will help you understand the fundamentals of anime characters and draw them with ease.
Though you may never have heard of a ninja skateboarder or a singing surfer, one of the best things about anime character design is that there are no rules! Feel free to combine different character types and styles to create a character that represents you and your interests.
Part of what makes anime so popular is that characters are known for having loud expressions and emotions. To help convey these sentiments through your anime character’s face, follow along as artist Enrique Plazola teaches you how to draw anime eyes in four different styles!
One of the best things about digitizing your anime drawings is that you have limitless options for posing and positioning your characters. Character designer and animator McCoy Buck shows you how to do exactly that using digitized vector points for reference.
Anime drawing and character design is unique in that it allows for open-ended creativity while still remaining within standard design principles, like proportions.
1. Draw an oval and divide it into 4 sections. This will be the basic outline of your anime character’s head. The proportions don’t have to be exact, but make the oval narrower at the bottom since that will be the chin. Once you’ve drawn the oval, draw a horizontal line through the center of it. Then, draw a vertical line through the center ...
However, if your character’s hair is going to be short, draw a narrow oval on each side of the head. Have the top of the ears line up with the horizontal line running through the center of the face, and have the bottoms line up with the bottom of the nose. Then, draw the flaps of the ear inside each oval.
For the torso, draw a quadrilateral (a 4-sided shape) that’s wider at the top and narrower at the bottom. Eventually, the wide corners at the top will become your character’s shoulders.
Come up with a story first. Then, you'll need the ability to draw out that story. If you need any more help , you can go to any book store and find manga to give you a look on how a good story is written out. Or, borrow some manga from your library. Keep practicing, as it can take time to get all the pieces sorted.
Community Answer. The best trick for drawing hands well is to study your own hands first. Notice the shape, color, texture, angles, etc. Draw your hand in dozens of different positions and in different lighting. This isn't a shortcut, per se, but it's an exercise that will improve your drawing.
Make the hands about 1/5 the length of the arm, and make the feet about 1/6 the length of the legs. To get the proportions right, make your stick-figure outline about 7 times as tall as your character’s head. Have the arm lines start about 1/5 of the way down the line you draw for the torso.
The nose will overlap with the vertical line you drew. To see it better, make it darker than the vertical line, or erase the vertical line around the nose.
It is worth pointing out the difference between these two styles. Anime is the animated version, while manga are just still images. Therefore, anime can be watched on TV, like a cartoon, while manga is similar to a comic book.
Anime has a very distinguishable style. When drawing anime, there are a few rules to follow. Most importantly, the exaggerated features:
If you are a beginner and are trying to learn how to draw anime, keep in mind that you can learn, but you have to practice. Don’t give up! Furthermore, the good thing about anime drawings is that you can turn anything into an anime. Even your own self-portrait.
These step-by-step tutorials focus on the face, which, as it turns out, is pretty easy to do:
Drawing anime characters is fascinating and looks pretty hard—but, interestingly, all your favorite characters (from simple to extremely complicated) are born out of basic shapes like circles, squares, triangles, and so on.
However, giving them the right body structure enhances their personalities, and viewers can relate to them more as you convey the characters' thoughts and emotions through their physique.
Ren Tsuruga and Shoutarou Fuwa in the anime Skip Beat! An exemplary use of colors is shown in Avatar: The Last Airbender, where the characters from different nations are shown with their respective colors. Water Tribe is shown in blue, Fire Nation has a red color, the Earth Kingdom is green, and Air Nomad is Yellow.
An example in the image above is Yuno from the anime Black Clover (the manga artist is Yuki Tabata). Yuno is serious, handsome, and sophisticated. He also has the power of the wind. All these attributes are clearly identifiable in this drawing.
Shading is important—it gives your drawing a real-life look. It enhances the two-dimensional object and creates a sense of three-dimensionality. To perfect your shading skills, first look at how objects of different sizes and surfaces reflect light.
And perspective drawing is a method of enhancing the 2D object to give it a look of three-dimensionality. A great example is a cube, as shown above. Though all the sides are equal, they appear smaller from a distance.
To use color effectively, you should be aware of simple theories like warm, cool, and complementary colors. Each color helps depict specific situations—for example, white is a symbol of peace. You can draw characters in white clothes if they are supposed to be plain and simplistic.