Dear Artist: 'Art', unlike other school textbooks, is something that you cannot learn within a week's period. Why? Simply because there's nothing that you have to memorize; it has nothing to do with your mind - you're going to use your hand all the time, that's why. So all what you're going to need when reading drawing tutorials is patience and practice.

  In my opinion, there are better ways to learn how to draw anime style figures than reading tutorials. Tutorials, of course, help you 'understand' what's behind the scenes, and reading them is a good start. However, watching A LOT of anime for a long period of time, going over LOTS of anime image galleries, and studying the way expert anime artists do the beautiful eyes of Belldandy or the way they do Kenshin's perfect torso is much better than listening to someone telling you "Step Three: Now draw a line from her neck with an angle of 45 degrees..." -_-; (unfortunately, this is what I'm going to do XD)

  As a start to other complicated tutorials, it might be helpful to understand the character's body's anatomy first.
We're going to begin with a quick sketch, so let's start with a stick figure. Simply, draw an oval/circle that will represent the head. Don't worry about making it a perfect clean circle and don't worry about making tenths of lines, but worry about making your sketch pretty dark. To make it easier for me, I folded over an A4 paper and used only one half to draw this sketch. You don't have to do this if you want more room on you paper.
The pink areas on the stickman are mostly joints. These parts of a body can move easily. Since you can move your neck, then your character can do it too, and so on.

  In this step, it's better to imaging your own body and draw your stick figure according to it, as this would make it easier to draw the details of the body afterwards. For example, don't draw the arms directly from the stick's spinal, but rather draw a horizontal line that would represent the shoulders. Do the same for the pelvis area.

  I don't like drawing over a mess of dark lines, and that's why I folded my paper previously. Now, use the back of the other half of the paper (or use a new paper if you didn't fold it in the first place.) to draw very light lines of the stickman we did previously - draw them just as guidelines. You might not see the first sketch, so you need a light source under your paper. Use the lightbox if you are lucky and you have it. I just put the paper over my PC's monitor and traced the figure lightly 0_o; (BTW, if you have the lightbox then you don't need to re-draw the stickman.)

  Now, draw more detailed outlines of your character, but don't put many details. This isn't the final thing. Just try to do the right proportions for the body.

  Now, if you want the previous step to be your last one, then make the undetailed outlines a bit light, and then re-draw your final character (see left), then clean your guidelines and mess.
But if you want a neater final product, then repeat step 2 with a new paper, but this time, instead of re-drawing the first stickman, re-draw the undetailed outlines of the above body very lightly. Then, add the body's details (fingers, eyes, hair, etc.), clothes, erase any un-needed lines, edit what needs to be edited (big hands, fat thigh, etc.) and you're done! =)

  You might notice that I've slightly changed the position of the girl's feet. It's because she turned out really funny and weird when I tried to copy the same position of the stickman >_<

  To tell you the truth, I never use this method to draw any sketch, I usually start directly with the hair, then the face and so on; what you see on the left is the first sketch ever I drew using the stickman thingy 0_o
BUT, using the stickman method helped me finish the whole sketch in sweet 20 minutes, while it used to take me hours to drew a sketch from pure scratch XD.

  And now that you've tried a simple pose, you might want to try more complicated poses and more detailed characters. You might also want to try this: Get some images of anime characters from the net, which have various poses, and draw the stickman figure over them. This should be very helpful in understanding complicated poses...well at least I think so ^^;

  Anime characters aren't always the same. They might differ with each series' style. For example, a serious show with a dark plot will have quiet characters with narrow eyes, and are almost realistic - they don't make any funny faces or impossible moves. Example: Gundam Wing.

  Adventure/humor shows mostly have bright, witty characters with huge, glimmering eyes, multi-colored hairs, and they can turn into SD (super-deformed) form easily. Example: Sailormoon.

  Anime characters' drawings might vary within a single show as well, that is, you see the combination of the two previously discussed types, and even more...
I concluded that this may happen in a series that has two kinds of people: Very Evil and Good/Bright. Though this happens mostly in less serious animes than the first discussed type XD.
Example: Weiss Kreuz

  Believe me, the best thing to do after learning the basics of an anime character is practicing, practicing, practicing, and practicing. Even if your practicing took a year, two years, or even three, you still have to practice; because the world of anime and drawing never ends. You discover lots of things just by seeing a picture or watching a new anime...
And then...after you improve your own anime style, you can design your own site's mascot, or make a nice flash movie full of kawaii bishounens and bishoujo's XD~

  Anywayz, I hope you guys found this intro useful, cuz I spent about 7 hours doing this page T__T....But anyhow, feel free to check the other tutorials that I've made, and I hope you find them more useful...and less prattle-ic XD.

-see ya!
 » N Rhythm.





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