How To Draw A Manga Head

Hi, I'm Kyle. I'm an illustrator, and I'm going to take you through some tips on drawing manga. I'm going to show you how to draw a manga head.

I'm going to start off with a male head, and maybe try him from a few different angles, so you can see them and do them however you want. So we're going to start out with a sketch of a nice big circle. Don't worry if it isn't perfect, mine isn't.

Now, you're going to make a line just about right in the middle of it, now link onto that line with some nice long curves along the side. You can bring that to a point if you like to make it look like more of a younger character, but if you want to do it square, you can make the character look a bit older and more mature. So we're going to bring that down to there on the other side, which brings it to the edge of the cheek - you will see what I am talking about as we go on.

Now, we'll just make a bit of a suggestion along here of the cheekbone, then just flatten off the sides of what will be the skull since it's never too round. Now, we're going to go onto the neck, that line will actually be behind the jaw, the base of the skull, so the neck joins on about there, we'll just bring the neck down a little bit - we're not focusing on that too much though, it's just there as a guideline for when it joins onto the shoulders. So if we take another line across here, just above where you did the jawline - not too much.

That's going to be the line for the center of the ear, and the center of the eye. So we'll just draw a nice, little curve in for the ear, and the same on the other side. Keep them nice and loose, and just have some fun with it.

Now, I'm going to do a line here to show where the bottom of the nose is going to come in, and not too far down from that is where the mouth is going to be. Now, just in line with, not the ear tip, but where the ear leaves the head is the brow line, and I'm just going to mark that in as a guide for now. Now, we'll get started with the eyes.

So we make a little mark in just from the edge, another mark there, and there, it doesn't have to be too exact, but the space between the eyes should be about another eye's width. This keeps things in proportion. Now what I'll do here is a little arch, not too big, unless you want the character to have big, expressive eyes.

Larger eyes can make your character look a lot younger, and a little more feminine if you like, but I'm going to give this guy fairly small eyes. Obviously, nothing too major at this point. You can always tidy up and have another go at this point.

So now we're going to work with the nose. I've got this central line here. With manga, you get most people just drawing down the one side noses, almost like they're just drawing the shadow down one side.

Don't always do it, but that's what people tend to do. I'm going to take it just from the bridge of the nose in between the eyes there, with an arc here, and just bring it in around what will be the nostril, this side, and bring that up. That will be shaded in later.

Now think about where the mouth goes, actually up a little bit. Just for now a simple line. Now, I'm just going to start tidying up what I've one already here.

If you want to add hair to your character, which you probably will, the hairline is usually a little higher than you'd think, around there. You've got to think when you're doing the hairline, it's not just a bowl around the head, you've got to think about the fact that there's a part somewhere there, a pretty central part, it just comes along like that. There's a crown to the hair which is usually just past the top of the head, it actually sprouts out from that direction.

We'll put a few lines just there to show the path of where the hair is coming from.