How To Draw A Manga Girl

Hi, I'm Kyle, I'm an illustrator and I'm going to take you through some tips on drawing manga and chibi. Okay, I'm going to show you how to draw a manga head and I'm going to draw a female character. So, I'm just going to start off with a nice big circle.

You don't worry too much about it at this stage, it's still nice and rough. Use a good hard pencil for this -H or 2H- just so you'll have nice light lines. Take a line just down there, not too far past the end of the circle.

You're going to take some curved lines, either side across to that. You're just going to bring those in. There we go.

You can round that off just there because that's going to be the chin of your character. You can round it off if you like. You can leave it quite pointed.

It's up to you really. So from here, we're going to take a line, just across here. It's not quite in the middle of the circle, just a little bit lower and it's going to be just about knocking out roughly where the eye line is going to be and where the middle of the ear is.

So you're just going to draw in just a rough shape for the guideline of the ear. Okay, so we're just going to make another line just about there and another line just about there. Okay.

Now, female manga characters tend to have quite big, quite expressive eyes. They tend to look really cute and sparkly and all that kind of thing. So, nice big eyes.

This is going to be just like a bit of a marker for the boundaries of where the edge of the eyes are going to extend to. Remember, there's usually about an eye's width between the eyes just to keep things nicely in proportion on the face. Okay.

Just to signify the top of the eye, there's a nice big arch there. It's a little tighter just on the inside. You're just essentially drawing the eyelids there.

It isn't too dark and it isn't too precise at this point, you're just mapping things out. And the same down here. Just think about the shape of her eyelid.

It's really quite exaggerated and everything, but try to think about the shape of the human eyelid. They're not quite equal, but we'll tidy that up later. So, just where, not the tip of the ear but where the top of the ear meets the head, it's about the brow line, so it's going to mark that in there and on the other side there.

And just going to mark in where the nose is. They tend to have quite small noses on female manga characters. Again, not everyone does it but just the sake of argument.

So you're going to take a low curve from this center line. A low curve is kind of like this, just to the base where you made that mark. Okay, I made that mark a little too low, but not to worry, I'm just going to mark in where the lip line would be.

Think about if you're going to do reflections in the eye, think about the direction of the light. You've just got to think about where the hair comes in, so you've got to put the brow line in about there. Think about where the parting is going to be because the hair just doesn't form a big bowl; where the crown of the hair is going to be.

I think I'm going to give this character a ponytail just to keep away from all the details we've just drawn in the face. In a few moments, just make sure it's really nice, really good pencils at this point. So obviously from here, you can take your ironing kit but just about this point you can pretty much call it done.

And that's how to draw a female manga head. .