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.