For this how to draw guide, I will use the 1:5 ratio. This is not a good ratio for drawing chibi but rather for drawing an adolescent or short adult. The following character will be drawn.

After that, I’ll be covering how all the other different ratios can be used. Of course, she doesn’t exactly have a 1:5 ratio, but when I originally drew her with a perfect 1:5 ratio, she looked really weird.

How to Draw the First Circle

Draw five circles that are the same size and stack on top of each other. On the top circle, draw two horizontal lines that curve slightly upwards. These lines will represent the eyebrows. Draw two lines that slant upwards and towards each other, with their opposite ends touching the eyebrows.

For the eyes, draw lines that travel horizontally and curve upwards. Each of these lines travel downwards and wrap around at the points of the lines that are the farthest away from each other, forming almost half circles. The half circles form full polygons by forming points as the open ends of the half-circles close. Within these closed polygons, draw curving horizontal lines that curve upwards. These lines are near the top of the polygons. This will separate these eyes into two different sections. In the lower section of each eye, draw a vertical line and have that line curve to the right.

Noses are very tricky organs to learn how to draw. Some cartoon artists completely omit the nose or try to draw minimalistic elements of the nose, since the nose is difficult to draw attractively. I try to draw the areas that are the most shaded. Also, I read that with characters with some ethnic backgrounds, the nose needs to be more emphasized. For this face, most of the shading will be on the left side. So draw two vertical lines that curve to the right slightly. For the nose, draw a vertical line that curves to the left. When you reach the bottom of this line, have the line travel horizontally to the right while durving upwards. Reverse the direction of the curve where you want the middle of the nose to be and then reverse the curve again. Finish the other side of the nose with a line that travels horizontally and curves to the right.

Draw two curving horizontal lines that connect together. These lines will curve upwards. Then draw one horizontal line that curves downwards. These lines will connect at the ends, forming a polygon. In the middle of this polygon, draw a horizontal line that curves downwards slightly.

Ears can be as simple or as complex as you want to make them. Gosh, you don’t even have to draw them. In this case, I’m just going to draw a simple curve.

Since the head is tilted a bit to the right, the shape of the edge of the face will look different for each side. One side will be a gradually curving line where the line curves downwards and to the right. On the right side, draw a line that travels upwards while curving somewhat downward. At some point, this line will curve sharply outwards before returning to the path where it was originally traveling. This is the cheekbone, a feature that some people have more pronounced than others.

To draw the hair on the forehead, draw two waving lines that are close together, eventually meeting at one point.

To the right of the strand you just drew, draw several curving lines that travel to the right and curve downwards and to the left.

On the other side of the head, draw a similar strand of hair that consists of two lines that wave and connect together.

At some point on the strand of hair, draw a line that travels downwards with the line curving downwards and to the right.

Attached to the curving line, draw another strand that curves downwards around the ear. Again, this is two lines that connect together at a point.

Draw a line that travels upwards and waves. This waving can be slight or pronounced.

On the right side of the head, draw several more strands that are clumped on top of each other.

Finally draw the top of the head. Do not draw a perfect curve unless you are drawing a cartoonish character. Most people have imperfectly shaped heads and the top of the hair often consists of different clumps, which will cause the hair to not be perfectly symmetrical.

Draw lines that connect to the bottom of the head. Since the head is turned a particular way, the part of the neck that is farther away from the direction that the head is turned will appear more curving, while the other side of the neck will appear slightly closer to the center of the head.

In the next post, I will draw out the rest of the body as it covers the rest of the circles. In that post or the post afterwards, I will add color and shading. Then I’ll be drawing the 1:6, 1:7 and 1:8 ratios. If you would like any particular characters drawn using these ratios, email me at sketchinghouse@gmail.com. I’m going to try to talk Marisol into doing a how to draw chibi characters, since I have no experience drawing those types of characters at all.

See y’all next week,

Alex

Start by drawing a curving line that slants towards the head.

On the part of the ear that’s farther away from the head, draw the line as a curve that suddenly goes into a slant that moves towards the head.

Draw a line that starts near the bottom middle near the edge of the ear. This line will travel along the outer edge of the ear until you reach the top corner closest to the head. Then the line will curve downwards and away from the head until it stops.

Where the last line you drew ends, place your drawing tool slightly above the end and draw a curving line that travels downwards. Continue until you draw a half circle.

The next part looks sorta like an upside down S that is a little more elongated and attached to the half circle you drew.

At this point, draw another S that is right-side up and attaches at the bottom to the line that you just drew.

Now locate the inner curving line and draw two curving lines that travel downwards and attach at the tip like a triangle or a strand of hair.

Finish by drawing a line that travels near the inner line that you just drew on the outer side on the inner side of the ear (good thing there’s pictures, this is confusing). At the bottom of the ear, draw a small curving line that curves upwards.

Next, let’s try another type of ear (woo!). Start off by drawing a curving line that looks like a hook. The line will be curving towards wherever the head is supposed to be.

Wherever you want the bottom of your ear to be, draw a line that curves downwards.

On the side of the ear that is away from the head, draw a slightly curving line that connects both of the other lines.

Draw a curving line within the hook part of the line and have that line travel along the outside part of your line until you stop somewhere near the top.

Where the last line ended, move up a little and draw a line that travels downwards and curves, attaching to the outer part of the ear. This line will travel down, slant downwards and to the left and then slant more steeply until it touches the outer part of the ear.

Now head over to the other part of the ear and draw two lines, one that curves upwards and one that curves downwards. These lines will be curving away from each other. The bottom line will slant downwards more and father out than the upper curve.

From where you left off, draw a line that travels downwards and curves towards the character’s head.

From this point, draw a similar curving line that sorta forms a small M but stops early and slants more towards the head.

The next part’s incredibly difficult to describe. Yeah, the ear is kinda tricky. Luckily, most people aren’t experts in what an ear looks like and most people won’t notice if there are minor errors in the ear. Of course, if you’re trying to get the ear really right, you’ll need to draw from an art model.

Now, let’s draw the ear that’s really difficult to see. The ear that is drawn from the back. Start by drawing a slightly curving line.

Draw a second line that makes a pass at the first line. This line travels more downwards and is even less curved.

At the bottom of the last line that you drew, draw a second line that curves in the other direction.

At the bottom of this line, draw a small curving line that travels away from where the ear connects to the side of the head and curves downwards. Then draw a line that travels directly upwards.

Where you left off at the straight line, draw a second line that curves upwards and away from the ear.

Draw a slightly curving line that connects the two lines that are traveling somewhat vertically up. Draw a line that hangs freely to the left of the ear. Find the bottom of the ear and draw a line that curves away from the ear and upwards.

Where was I? Working, school and being lazy. I’m sorry! I know, it’s been awhile. Marisol and I were trying to get an apartment but we ended up working so hard that everything started to suffer. From now on I’m going to stick with contributing to our tutorial art gallery.

Anyway, here’s another art drawing tutorial on nothing specific in particular. This tutorial focuses on drawing face art, rather than body art, giving explanations on how to draw out each part. I added advanced sections, even though they’re not really that much more advanced. They’re really just extra things you can look out for when you’re trying to go the extra mile with your art lessons.

Outline of the head

Make light strokes in a slightly curling motion when drawing the line art for the head. Stare at the edge of your reference photo and try to visualize the shape of the outline of the head. Advanced: pay extra attention to special details like whether or not the face is round or sunken. If you can capture each indentation of the face, capture it.

Mouth

Mouths can be an incredibly simple part of line drawing. With the mouth, draw a very simple curving line. The way I drew the mouth gave the character a slight smirk. Now, to draw the lips or not to draw them. Advanced: The mouth is drawn sorta like a small m. There is a dip in the middle, though the dip varies from person to person. Some dips are tiny, while others take up a little more space. Since the lips are not directly facing the camera but are faced slightly to the left, make the left side of the lips more rounded while making the right side more slanted in order to create that illusion.

Why draw the lips? A lot of don’t include the lips, which can create a very cute picture. Some artists even avoid drawing the mouth in order to emphasize the character’s youth. Plus, lips often look somewhat strange on drawn character, though they don’t have to be. Much of the beauty of lips comes from the right shading and highlights, which will be in another tutorial. For now, you can stick with drawing simplistic lips, which work well with ethnic characters.

Eyes

A lot of artists start with the eyes because the eyes often determine whether or not the rest of the picture will end up working. But where you start really does not matter. For these eyes, take the reference picture and try to capture the outline of the eyes. For cartooning, this does not have to be exact and be sure to draw somewhat larger than what is in the real life picture. Draw the bottom part of the eye with a bulge in the middle bulging downward. The outer edges of the eyes can be drawn slanting up or down. Usually they are slanting downwards.

The top part of the eyes curve sharply upward from the outer corners of the eyes and form a gentle round curve. I removed the inner corners of the eyes because they did not look attractive. I then enlarged the eyes because I was worried that the eyes would be too hard to see. Advanced: start cleaning up the eyes. Use an eraser or white coloring to color over the parts of the lines you want to erase. Always erase in a way that will increase the roundness of the eyes.

Choose a color that you would like to use for your eyes. Fill in circles that fill up the entire eye lid. Draw a nice black line around your irises that is somewhat faint. Then switch to white and draw in a glare that is on the same spot for both eyes. This will be a small white circle that represents the light reflecting off of the eye. Advanced: Add a faint white line at the bottom of the irises.

Eyebrows

Add the eyebrows. Much of the individuality and emotion of the character comes from how the eyebrows are drawn. The combination of eyebrows and mouth form a large percentage of the emotions depicted through drawing. Also, since eyebrows vary, you can be somewhat creative with them. For these eyebrows, put a lot of weight on the inner part of the eyebrows in order to make them look thick. As you slant upwards and curve to the outer part of the eyebrow, make the line progressively fainter and thinner.

Hair

Draw the bangs as curving triangles. You can start by drawing the outline of the hair or add the bangs first. Bangs can be drawn in all sorts of ways. The types of bangs I drew were the ones that curve inward and are triangular. With these bangs, the messiness or neatness of your character can be emphasized by whether or not you have the bangs all going in one direction or not.

Coloring

Coloring, one of the most awesome parts of creating an image. This is especially awesome when you are using a Photoshop program. Not only can you choose among a seemingly infinite array of colors, but you can also place different colors on different layers and then alter these colors using hue/saturation.

Regardless of what you use, make sure that you color very carefully by going along the edges without going over them. If you’re drawing traditionally, it is recommended that you go over your artwork lines using and then finish coloring with high-quality markers. Alternatively, you can draw everything using your tablet or mouse and then create new layers for each color. Then, be sure to set each layer to multiply in order to avoid coloring over the lines that you worked so hard to draw.

That’s all it takes to construct a typical face (at least in the anime world). It really all comes down to personal taste. Draw a little here and see if you like it. Erase something there when you realize that it looks really dumb. Slowly clean up every stray pixel or smudge until everything starts to look polished.

I’m not even sure who this character will be but she’s temporarily named Angora. I might not even use her since I don’t hold on to characters unless they feel right. Maybe she needs some redesigning.

My story takes place in a setting inspired by pre-history Philippines. I’d draw her wearing the clothes that people wore during that time frame, but they mostly wore nothing. That reminds me of a museum exhibit I saw of Native Americans. Some of the figurines of the Native Americans were completely nude. That was so weird since I was shielded from all nudity as a kid and then I’m exposed to a culture that sometimes runs around naked. I guess I learned from that how values can be way different from culture to culture.

You might think “hey, she doesn’t look Filipino.” Well, actually she’s Negrito. From the research I did, Negritos settled in the Phillippines before the Austronesians, an indigenous group from what is now called Taiwan.

That is the initial sketch I started off with. I like that sketch and might use it for a different drawing. How did she change so much? A whole bunch of reasons. The main reason was that I wanted to practice foreshortening, which is something I need to learn how to do with the body. Well, I didn’t really succeed at foreshortening her because that is tough!

What’s foreshortening? Foreshortening is how objects seem deformed at different angles. I guess I made her arms somewhat foreshortened, but their sizes are roughly the same and not large enough to show a real contrast.

So now what? I drew new torso lines in order to make her body appear turned to the side. I also foreshortened her shoulders, making one appear larger and one smaller to indicate that one shoulder is turned farther away from the point-of-view.

Next, I made her sides more shapely and raised her chest. Now she doesn’t look like she has the body of a 90000 year old woman. (I meant to say 900, not 90000).

At this point, I decided to redraw her clothes. Why? She looked like she was wearing a kimono or tunic, which doesn’t really fit with her character. But nudity doesn’t work for me, so I made up some clothes. I also redrew her arms. I liked how they looked, but they look way too long right now. I think this is where I was getting tired two nights ago because her proportions are extremely out of whack. I started drawing her legs because I wanted to shorten her dress. With dresses, its really important that you draw all of the legs out in order to make sure that you have the proportions right.

I did a little resizing and drew out the basic shape of the head.

Then I drew her face. I was aiming for a face that was both delicate and Negrito, but I ran into a problem. Most cartoon and manga faces are European/Asian inspired. Rarely do you see other races represented. I really had nothing to go off. I wanted to emphasize this character’s ethnicity, but I also wanted to keep her features relatively simple. So I experimented with the nose and lips until I got the results that I wanted.

I also added hair, my favorite part.

Then I added lineart and widened her features. I don’t know why I did this and I think I’m going to change it back later.

As you can see now, I colored her. I don’t know if I gave this advice out yet or not, but setting your coloring layers on multiply allows you to color without coloring over dark lines. This is good if you have a hard time coloring within the lines.

Then I used a handy-dandy color scheme generator at: www.colorschemer.com/online.html

Just plug in the value for one of the colors you’re using and it’ll generate colors that are compatible. These colors should pop out more when put together.

So I drew her and showed her to Marisol and she drew all over her. She took her mouse and drew all these lines all over my drawing like it was nobody’s business (joking. I asked her to).

This is sort of like an artist’s version of proofreading. It really helps to have someone else look at your artwork before you finish it because they can see mistakes that you missed. Being an artist doesn’t have to be lonely.

I took her advice and adjusted her. But I gave her brown eyes instead of blue.

Like usual, I have to finish most of my tutorials in multiple blog posts. This isn’t because tutorials take that long, but because I have to write these in gaps of time between school and work. I wish I could write more tutorials, but time is always so short. Still, Marisol and I promise that we’ll always keep updating. We won’t be those people who stop posting out of the blue.

I love you all,

Alex

Well, it turns out that I wasn’t completely off base if I were a Japanese cartoon artist. Really short, stubby arms and legs are the style found in chibi-style drawing. Really long legs are common in Shoujo manga, while really big heads are given to characters in order to increase their comicalness.

You might be thinking, “what the fudge?” These characters are all deformed. They don’t look like real people at all.

Okay… maybe you’re not really thinking that. You probably already know that art, especially cartoon art, can bend the rules as easily as Neo can stop bullets in mid-air. Abstract artists put ears where the noses are and put toes where the ears are supposed to be. Newspaper comics often are drawn with very little attention placed on realism. Many artists really do not care if their drawings look like photographs that have had the pencil sketch filter run on them. This is especially true for manga, which tries to stylize real life, rather than duplicate real life.

I created a gridline to show how four different figures can have much different proportions. I created each of these figures based off trends that I see in cartooning. I noticed that the two biggest differences in the proportions of the body seem to be found in the head and the legs. I broke down the drawing of each figure into sections in order to show how each figure is drawn (of course, not all figures are drawn from the head to the feet, but this is for illustrative purposes).

Above is a bunch of floating heads. No, they’re not victims of Sephiroth. Notice how they still have shoulders attached to them. The first head (the one farthest to the left) is drawn with the realistic style in mind. All the other characters are deviations from the realistic style. All of these characters are meant to have the exact same height in order to emphasize the difference in proportion. The second head is drawn slightly smaller than the first head in order to make more room for the body about to be drawn. The second head is larger, filling in the top section of the grid. The last head is the most comic head. The head’s so big that it doesn’t even fit in the first section of the grid.

Next, I added most of the torso for each body. The normal figure’s torso is the largest. The other figures seem to give more space to the head and limbs. Perhaps this is because the head and limbs are the most animated parts of a character. There isn’t much a character can say with his chest unless he’s standing in front of a mirror making his muscular chest dance (I’m not sure what that says and I’m not sure if I want to know). The second character has the smallest body, since the majority of the space is going to be taken up by the incredibly long legs. I gave the third character a decently sized body. The fourth character has a childlike body. If you want to give a character a really childlike body, make the shoulders more rounded and thicken the body. This will give the character the short stature of a child. Big heads also show that the character hasn’t grown into her head yet.

Next, I drew the lower half of the body. For most of the characters, I completed the arms at this level. Real-life hands, when held at the sides, extend slightly past the hip. This rule is not followed at all with the second and fourth characters. The really long arms that the second character has are meant to match her enormous legs. The fourth character only has arms that are slightly longer than they’re supposed to be. As for the lower half, I’m not always too great at drawing a lower half when I’m drawing the figure, so any patterns you might notice are all in your head :p .

For all of the figures, the next portion was almost entirely devoted to the legs. I tried to make the realistic character’s legs look the most realistic by giving them more of a round shape. The last figure, on the other hand, will have really simplistic legs. As you can see by now, the second character’s legs are going to be really long. Why is that? I’m not too sure. I know that Shoujo usually has characters with really long legs, but I can’t figure out why? If anyone has any idea, please email me.

In the final section, I added the legs. Again, I added a realistic roundness to the first figure. His body looks kinda solid, like he’d be a great martial artist. The second figure has really long arms and legs (I told you they would). The arms look ropey and the legs dominate more than 50% of the space. This character would definitely make fantastic basketball player. The third figure had a bigger head, with slightly longer legs. This character could pass as a run-of-the-mill anime character, except she still looks realistic enough to look attractive. The fourth figure has a head that dominates the character’s body. This character will rather be a egg-headed Ivy League type or a really cute mascot. Most likely the latter.

What do we get from all this? I think we’ve already figured out that an artist can draw whatever the heck he or she wants, but it’s probably also a good idea to keep the style of your character consistent. When you use a certain style, most viewers will get a general idea of what you’re trying to express when designing your character in a certain way. Most viewers will notice that you’re trying to draw a hard-edged realistic type or the emotional and eternally adorable mascot. Why confuse them by adding a huge head and extremely long, yet realistically defined arms. Unless you’re trying to draw Stretch Armstrong’s head exploding in space, why weird out your viewer with contradictory elements.

Then again, maybe you should prove me wrong. Some of the most successful innovators in this world were told that their idea would never work. If you could really visualize something great and fresh that mixes different styles, go for it. That’s where these styles came from in the first place. New ideas don’t come from artists following the same old tired conventions, but rather by experimenting and coming up with new conventions.

Happy drawing

Alex.