How To Draw An Anime/Manga

CharacterPaul Martinez

Anime/Manga cartoons are a very popular, and there are many ways to make them. We can spend a few lessons on how to do the entire character.For now, we’ll focus on

doing a simple profile of a characters head.

We’ll take it step by step.

GuidelinesIf you want a picture to come out the way you to, you’re going to have to make some guide lines.

Guide lines are just simple shapes shown in the picture. It’s made up of a circle and a crosshair.

Crosshairs are important to place to face on your character.

EyesEyes

Jaw area

Pick and Choose

There are many ways to draw a character’s face. Eyes can be as simple or detailed as you want. Each artist has their own preference or unique style to draw the faces.

Make sure when drawing the eyes, follow the face guidelines. The eyes shouldn’t be bigger than the crosshair area it’s in. You can add more guidelines to help you for placement and size.

Before After

Now you should be all set. Finalize your character with whatever hairstyle you choose.

But let’s not stop there. Coloring also helps the character look more alive instead of being a bland, ordinary sketch.

Coloring Basics

You can use a black ink pen or black colored pencil (Whatever you prefer or have on you at the time) to outline the pencil sketches of your drawing.

Assort colors you want for hair, clothing, and skin color.

Coloring Basics

Darker

Lighter

Adding in wrinkles to character clothing makes it a bit more believable and realistic.(adding too much or putting wrinkles in the wrong places can mess it up, so pay attention to how real clothing looks like)

Just like drawing out the character. Filling in the character with shades and wrinkles to the clothing can make it more alive.Shading goes according to light source direction and intensity. Wrinkles to the clothing goes by the position the character is in.

Coloring Basics

Let’s get started on the hair. Here in the picture shows the lines being colored in go in the direction of how hair would normally grow. Do this to avoid making your character’s hair look like a solid colored shape on their head.

Coloring BasicsUsing this method correctly will make it come out like this.

But bringing up preference again, many have their own way to color in hair, make the hair shine, etc. This is just one of the many possible ways to color.

Luckily, there is no wrong way to do it.

Finished!

Now you have your finalized character