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This tutorial will help you to draw a basic anime character. Tools you will need for this tutorial include: Pencil, White Eraser, Paper, Scanner, an art program such as Photoshop (Gimp is a free alternative to photoshop and can be downloaded online for free).
I like to start with the head first. It should be like an upside down egg. More rounded at the top, and slightly pointed towards the bottom. Sketch lightly at first. Next locate the middle of your egg shape.
Draw a cross hair going horizontally through the shape. You can arch it a little to your likeing. This is where the eyes will go. Many people think the nose is the middle of the face, this is not true. Our eyes are actually the middle of our face.
Next we will draw the eyes. I like to think of the top of the eye as a half C shape (the upper half obviously). Leave some space below the half C and draw a straight line below it for the bottom of the eye. In the middle of the eye draw a large round oval. It should be just brushing the half C and bottom line. This is the pupil. Within the pupil I like to add a smaller oval for the iris and then 2 round circles in either angle for the lights of the eyes. You can shade the smaller oval to make it pop out some more.
Next the nose. It’s like a small zig zag line, starting between the eyes, tilt towards one eye, away, and towards. It looks like a small lightning bolt. You can shade the lower half of the line to add some definition.
Last on the face comes the lips. Depending on the expression you are going for the lips will be different. For happy, draw an upside down triangle shape below the nose. Round the corners so that it’s not so sharp. add a small half arch inside the triangle about midway or three quarters of the way down. This is the tongue. For a more serious look you can simply draw a thin line for a mouth and add some shadeing beneath it to create the illusion of lips.
With the head and face done, I like to draw out my plans for the body. I start by drawing a stick figure. We can all draw stickmen so this should be easy. Extend one line from the head down. That will be the basic body. You can add the lines for the arms and legs now if you wish or wait until a little later.
The torso is next. On a female character, the torso is like an upside down triangle. It should be located in the top third or so of the body line. Make sure that it’s wide enough to match however large your head is. Next we’ll add a waist and some shoulders. On the torso, on the top two corners create small to medium sized circles. These will be the shoulders. On the bottom point draw a medium sized circle for the waist.
Arms and legs can be difficult to draw. It is important to remember people do not stand perfectly straight, and you will want your drawing to have some movement and flow to it. Start by adding lines from the shoulders and hips. Be careful not to make the arms too long (it’s a common mistake). Look at human arms when they stand, their finger tips come just to mid thigh. I make two ovals around each line, to differinciate where the elbow/knees begin/end. One oval for calf, one for thigh, one for forearm, one for bicep, etc.
Hands and feet are by far the hardest thing for most beginers to master. What I find works well for hands for me is to once again visit our friend, the upside down rounded triangle. This will be the palm of the hand. From this we draw 5 lines with the ones on the end being shorter than the middle 3. These will be the fingers. On each line we drew, we will add 2-3 circles. lightly, because these will be erased. These give the fingers a natural appearance of knuckles. Go around the shapes makeing an outline for each finger and gently erase the circles within them. For Feet I also use a triangle but I try to skew it a little. If it’s too pointy it will look like the character is on it’s tip toes which is no good. Add a circle for the heel, and use the same line and ball tecnique for the toes.
Lastly, the hair. It should sit slightly ontop of the oval egg shaped head. There should be some hair that sweeps down over the face, especially if your character has long hair. But even short hair should have some on the sides, etc. If your character has bangs, they should fall just above the eyes, almost touching them. Also they should not be perfect, they should flow out and overlap the egg we drew for the face. Each strand of hair does not need to be drawn individually, instead think of it as chunks, pieces, and the general flow and direction that you want the hair to go in.
You can add whatever clothes and accessories you like now overtop of the body that we created. Just remember they should be loose and natural looking like real clothes would be.
Our character is almost complete. Now we need to clean it up. Scan your drawing and import it into photoshop or a similar program. Take the eraser tool and clean up all your stray marks and eraser smudges. Next we need to ink the drawing before we can color it. If you have a tablet you can alternatively trace it to your likeing. If you don’t have a tablet there are a few tricks to speed up the “inking” process. You can use filters such as outline, stamp, and cutout, to do parts of the job for you. The great thing about photoshop is if you don’t like something you can always undo it lol. These will not do a perfect job. You will need to take a brush tool and fill in missed spots, and clean up stray marks with the eraser.
When you’re done, and it will take awhile, you can add color and shadeing to your character. I like to make a copy of the layer just so i’m not messing up my outline. I take away all the inner white space using the magic wand tool (make sure contagious is not selected because you want ALL the white space) and press delete. This becomes your outline layer. Keep it on top and don’t color on it. Make another copy of it and put it beneath there, this is where we’ll color. There should be no gaps so simply use magic wand again (this time you want contagious to be checked so it wont grab anything outside the boundaries of the black lines.) You can select areas, dump color into them, and move on. You can create a third layer above this one but still below your outline layer. You can experiment with shadeing here. I lower the transparency to about 30% and take a light grey color. I then use a medium sized brush and simply fill in areas where I think the shadow would fall. I then use white and add areas (on the same layer) where I think light would fall. If it looks a little funny you can experiment with the transparency and other settings. I then merge all layers and add a stroke of about 2-3 points to make it pop. And we have a completed anime character with color and shadeing :). Remember practice makes perfect.
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