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

Elderly men do not dominate manga and cartoons, but you can sometimes still find them playing a few important roles. These characters are given extra lines on the face to emphasize wrinkling and the sagging of a face. The elderly face usually has some features that are drawn out more than you would with a younger face. It seems like the older a character is, the more realistic the features are drawn, while the younger the face, the more details you omit. For instance, some young children do not even have mouths drawn. The elderly face can be really complex and the extra angles can end up requiring some really innovative shading. For this drawing tutorial, a more simplistic face is going to be drawn.

Draw a line that curves upwards. This will be a tiny line that represents the corner of the eye. Then draw a second line that travels outwards, curving slightly. Finish with a long, curving line that represents the bottom of the eye. These will be the eyelids.

Draw two curving lines in between the two eyelids. These will represent the irises. Notice how the entire eye isn’t completely shown. Instead, the top and bottom parts of the irises are covered by the eyelids.

Create a duplicate but reversed version of the eye you just drew.

Draw a line that slants downwards and to the left. This line will be beneath the eyes in the middle of the face. Yep, this is the nose. This line will then suddenly travel downwards and to the right, forming a right angle. The corner of this right angle will be rounded.

Draw a broad line that curves only slightly downwards to show a slight smile. This character is meant to be somewhat older, so I put slanting lines in the corners of his mouth that slant downwards.

Between the nose and the mouth, draw two lines that start somewhat near the nose that curve outwards and travel down towards the mouth.

Draw some curving lines beneath the eyes.

Draw two curving lines somewhat beneath the mouth that are small and very curved. Start drawing the jaw. The jaw will be less pointy than usual on this guy, since sagging skin will make his jaw seem wider.

Draw the rest of the head. Have the lines that make up the head slant outwards as they travel upwards. When you’re ready to draw the top of the head, draw a curving line that connects both slanting lines.

Draw the folk’s ears. Draw a curving line that starts at the edge of the head, curves and then travels downwards a long way becoming more straight with a slight curve. Have the line curve at the bottom until it touches the side of the head. As for the inside of the ear, you will probably need a human model
. No matter what, the ear is always drawn with curving lines near the edge of the ear within the ear. What’s tricky to draw is the opening of the ear canal near the ear lobe.

Draw the hair however you’d like, though it’s a bad idea to draw every individual strand.

Alex

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

Noses– most people have them and like lips and eyes, they are very useful. People can steal noses (hehehe, got your nose!), or get smacked in the nose every winter at least once. I get smacked in the nose at least once per winter because my boyfriend slips on the ice and I have to catch him, only to have him accidentally hit me in the nose and mouth. Ouch.

Some people have anxiety when it comes to drawing noses, but have no fear, noses are easy! In fact, noses are so easy that they can be drawn in four steps. This is going to be a short tutorial, folks.

1) First, you’re going to get a ruler and figure out how long your drawing’s nose is going to be. For the sake of this tutorial, I’m going to use three inches for my length because it’s an easy length to divide up evenly. I am math challenged. So, I’m going to draw a three inch long vertical line that has an inch long horizontal line at the bottom. Next, I’m going to draw a second three inch long line going up from the open end of the one inch horizontal line. Next, I’m going to divide this open-ended box into three equal sections; in my case, it’s all one inch sections.

2)  In the bottom third, draw a circle in the center. Depending on how wide you want the nose to be, you can make this circle any size you want. On the sides of the circle, add “wings.” These wings consist of half circles. Like the circle, you can make these as big or as small as you please. All noses are different. Now draw two lines that stem from the upper sides of the circle going up through the upper two thirds of the box.

3) Determine where you want your shading to be and create guidelines. Press dark for your dark tones, lighter for your medium and light tones. Also determine your light source. Additionally, create your nostrils. The nostrils start on the circle and extend into the “wings.” You can makes these as larger or as small as you wish, since in a drawing, the nostrils show how pointed a nose is.

4) Shade your nose, starting with the dark tones first. Take your blendy stick and soften the ark tones and “bleed” these dark tones into where you marked the midtones. Then lightly create the tones, leaving the light source white. Smooth the entire drawing with a Kleenex.

And you have created a nose for your drawing! Your drawing can smell! See how simple that was? I didn’t learn this technique until recently. Before, I just used parenthesis lines to create my noses, and that looked weird. Thanks to the Big Book of Drawing, I learned how to create noses and other facial features. It’s a wonderful book. Not only does it show how to draw realistic faces, but how to draw realistic animals and sketching techniques. Cool, huh? I got the book for Christmas about 6 years ago. I highly recommend it!

So there you have it, folks! Enjoy and have fun!

Love always,

Marisol