Okay… none of the two techniques worked for you. Don’t worry… they didn’t work for me either in the beginning when I first entered the art realm. I used to think guidelines were dumb until I learned how near impossible poses and action movements are to draw. I also avoided free sketching until I started worrying that everything I ever drew was just a copy of what someone else drew or photographed. But every new piece of artwork is like a new friend (to quote the great Bob Ross) and with all the awkwardness that comes with starting a conversation with someone you never talked to before. You have to break the ice, and sometimes breaking the ice feels near impossible.

A great icebreaker is the reference picture method of getting started. Find a picture of something you’d like to draw and look carefully at the edges and features. Decide what style of art you want to do (traditional, manga, digital) and figure out how much of the features you want to show. For me, this is the easiest way to get started drawing and poses are a lot easier because you don’t have to wrack your imagination to visualize the correct anatomy and positioning of a certain pose. You just look at what’s in the picture and try to draw it.

With this picture, I tried to stay minimalistic. I didn’t make an effort to emphasize the bridge of the nose and I didn’t care too much about texture for this tutorial. But as I played around with it, I decided that using a reference picture makes drawing way too easy sometimes (maybe that’s just me… something else might work better for you). I could have made the picture look digital, but that’s usually an entire day’s work for me and I only have 3 hours today to create this. So I decided to play around with animeitizing a realistic picture.

First, I made the eyebrows have less roundness in order to give them an edgier look. I did the same for the eyes and erased a lot of the eye lid while making the rest of the eye lids less round. Then I added pupils and a lens flare to the cornea. Really, no anime eye is complete without a lens flare.

When I got to the nose, I decided to erase the entire thing. I was trying to decide whether or not I should leave it blank. With anime noses, the general rule of thumb is that you want simpler noses for younger characters and more complex noses for older characters. Said goodbye to the nose, but I thought the face looked freaky with no nose in the middle (I think all noseless anime looks kinda weird and how hard is it to draw a little triangle there). So that’s why there’s that triangle where the nose should be.

Moving on… I shrunk the mouth a little and got rid of those freaky teeth. The thing about teeth is that they look fine on real people, but anime characters look manic when they have teeth. The teeth seriously pop out at you. But a nice, white square works fine for toothers. So I did that, shrunk the mouth a little bit, shrunk the teeth a little more, and then erased the lips.

On a side note, I’m a big fan of empowerment for everyone. Yet by making the mouth smaller I’m almost conforming to sexist ideals. I heard somewhere that Hello Kitty doesn’t have a mouth because Hello Kitty is a metaphor for the way Japanese society wants women to act. That is… Japanese women are expected to be cute and have almost nothing to say. They are supposed to be silenced. But on the flip-side, tons of anime and video game women kick butt very seriously. Anime is jam-packed with empowered women who can take care of themselves and pursue what they want. Not that they every draw these action-packed Amazon fem-warriors without their mouths. *Draws even bigger mouth on face.*

So next, I shrunk the face a little bit and made it more heart-shaped. This is really common in anime. Then I made sure to create a new layer (I’m drawing this whole thing on tablet) and use the pen tool so that my lines can be really smooth and round (pen tool rocks when creating anime characters). Using the pen tool seems time consuming, but eventually you learn to move quickly and it would take me a lot longer to manually clean up pencil strokes. A good piece of advice is to do each part of the pen tooling process in chunks so that if you make a mistake, you don’t have to start all over. And save often!!! *Beats with newspaper.*

Alright, she’s been animeitized! Now you might ask yourself, “why did he animeitize what could have been a perfectly good realistic picture.” One reason is that anime looks cool (yea, that’s the answer you’ll get from most manga-heads). But a less obvious reason is that I don’t know how to draw realistically using a tablet yet. Okay, I never learned to draw realistically period. Go ahead, beat me with a newspaper. They say you should always learn to draw realistically first before learning to draw anime. Well I learned to draw realistically perfectly fine using colors, blending tools, and the smudge/blur tool. Yeah, I know that people learn realistic first because “you have to know what anime is imitating before you can imitate it.” I think that’s a bunch of hooey. It’s like saying that in order to learn English, you have to learn Latin first and that if you learn English first, you’ll never be able to learn Latin. Hooey!

Stay tuned. I’ll be posting something new tomorrow or the day after that (depends on if Marisol’s muse visits her). My muse just got back for vacation from Sioux Falls. Hopefully she’ll stick around this time.

Signing out,

Alex

I added some color too

Tags: anime, Art, character development, draw, drawing, getting started, manga, profile, sketch, sketching