How To Draw Anime Heads

Hi. My name is Laura Watton, my website is PinkAppleJam.com, I'm the co-founder of SweatDrop Studios, and I've been illustrating in Manga Star for almost 15 years.

Heads are quite interesting actually, because if you take the average human skull, it isn't actually spherical. It's actually a bit like a kidney bean. So if I was to draw some cute facial features on here, it would look something like this.

You know you can taper off the heads, this would be the hairline, you draw hair coming down. You draw a character like this, more often than not your character won't really look very realistic. Obviously drawing in a manga-style is a very huge stone's throw away from realism, but there are elements of drawing comic books, comic illustration, that takes elements from real life and simplifies them.

So yes, if we start drawing skulls like so, at different angles, again this cross hair; very useful in the face's physical attributes such as eyes, nose, etc and so on. You can imagine where the hair would come from, middle of the hairline coming down. The jawline will join like so.

So yeah, whether you're interested in drawing comic books or not, attending life-drawing classes and having looked at different shaped heads. Obviously different hairstyles as well, where the hair grows on each person's head, that sort of thing; all very useful. So, very roughly, here are some examples of that sort of bean-shaped head, and how to adapt it into your manga-style drawing.