Many artists, when first learning how to draw, use head to body radios in order to determine how tall they will be making their character be. The chibi style uses a ratio of 1:2, 1:3, or 1:4. That means that a character with a ratio of 1:3 will have a body that is three heads long. To determine how tall the character will be, all the artist has to do is determine the approximate size of the head and then create a circle, which should be duplicated and stacked, one on top of the other. Then you just have to figure out how to draw the rest.

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.

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Tags: artist, cartoon, cartooning, chibi, circles, Eyes, face, features, forehead, hair, Nose, Noses, strands

New artists sometimes panic over proportions. I remember when I first tried drawing at age 7, all my character’s hands were bigger than their heads. Later on in life, I struggled to draw legs that looked right. My legs looked enormous while my bodies looked like oompa-loompa bodies.

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. Click to read more …

Tags: anime, cartoon, cartooning, chibi, comic, draw, drawing, figure, manga, Perspective, profile, proportion, shoujo, sketch