How To Draw Your Own Manga

Ever searched how to draw manga? I was doing that too a lot until I created this article.

Manga is a very popular and versatile style of art. Whether you're drawing domestic scenes or fantastic battles, the manga style of characters can work with both of them and more. Both professional and amateur artists can learn how to draw amazing pictures in this style.

Learning how to draw manga can be tedious. You'll need to practice often. You might end up covering pages upon pages in not-quite-right doodles of hands, bodies, and face before you'll be able to draw the manga characters you have in your head.

The payoff will be well worth the practice, however. Manga is a good-looking style that allows for a lot of diverse additions to your designs.

Getting Started

All drawings are made up of basic geometric shapes, regardless of the style or subject. Start your manga drawing by sketching out the guidelines and basic shapes of your characters. You'll find yourself using rectangles, parallelograms, and circles a lot to start your characters. You should try sketching these shapes over and over again to help you get better at it.

How to draw manga bodies and heads

Male torsos are boxier and wider than female ones. If you are trying to figure out how to draw a manga girl, her torso is going to be more hourglass shape that curves inward at the waist and flares at the hips.

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Learning how to draw manga heads is very simple. Start with a circle, then fill in the expressions. Depending on the nature of the character you're going for, you can have a simple basic circle or the oval that's used for more realistic art.

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Make sure the neck length and width makes sense for the rest of the body. This is an area where understanding real human anatomy is important. If the neck is off, it will throw the whole character out of balance.

How to draw manga faces

You learn how to draw manga faces in much the same way you learn how to draw human faces in other art styles. It's all about proportion. For a front-facing person, you should draw light guiding lines to dive the face in half lengthwise and longwise. Draw another line that divides the lower half of the face in half.

With these lines, you can figure out where to place the eyes, eyebrows, nose, and mouth. We'll get to eyes in a moment because one of the hallmarks of the manga drawing style is the characters' eyes. The nose—if you have once, depending on how abstract you're making the character—will be on the central line, on the horizontal line in the middle of the head. The mouth should be on the line right below that.

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If you've been studying the work of other manga artists, you'll notice that there is a lot of variation in the style and even presence of facial features. One of the great things about manga is that you can make a human face with a very abstract understanding of human features and still have an interesting, expressive character.

If you have a character facing in a direction other than looking right at the viewer, the same general rules of facial proportion still apply. Play around with having your characters in profile, looking down, looking up, looking slightly to the side…anything and everything. Knowing how to draw faces from different angles will give you a lot more options for your characters' poses.

How to draw manga eyes

Manga eyes are one of the most distinct marks of the style. They tend to be unusually large, though there's a lot of range of eye size between different manga artists. Learning how to draw manga eyes is really important because a lot of the emotion of manga characters is found in their eyes.

Eyes can be sharper or rounder in shape. The choice of eye shape will make a lot of difference in the kind of person the character seems like. Rounder eyes will be gentler, while sharper eye shapes will make the character look tougher.

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Expressions in manga are most often expressed by the eye. A smile is often accompanied by closed or semi-closed eyes that are shaped like an inverted U.

Pair the same shape of eyes with a straight line to make a character look annoyed and/or tired. Surprise is communicated by large, widened eyes. Pair eye expressions with different mouth expressions to communicate different expressions.

How to draw manga hair

Manga hair is famously very wild and exaggerated. This is not necessarily the case since you can draw some simpler, domesticated hair on characters without them looking like they don't belong in the style. However, learning how to draw manga hair in the trademark zany style is something that can be a lot of fun and will expand the kinds of people you can draw.

Start off your manga hairstyle by having a plan. Begin your drawing with a basic shape. Don't worry about the details yet, just get the core idea of the hairstyle down on paper.

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It's smart to think of the hair as a solid mass until you start working with color. This will keep you from getting bogged down in which way strands should fall. For drawing purposes, hair should be just like any other part of the body.

How to draw manga clothing

If you're new to drawing clothing, it's good to work with references. Clothing falls in different ways along the body that can be very easy to mess up.

Capes, dresses, and wizard's robes drape down. A character's build may stretch out a shirt or may result in them being drowned in fabric.

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References will be a big help here. If clothing falls wrong for how your character is standing, it will look very strange and off-putting.

Manga clothing tends to be very dramatic, so make good use of photos to help you get all the flowing drapery and details correct.

Here's a guide on the basics of how to draw manga for beginners.

Core Basics

Study Real Anatomy

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Learning actual human anatomy is an important part of how to draw a manga body. Manga often stylizes the human form, sometimes to the point of ridiculousness, but you'll notice that even the most wildly styled manga characters have proportions that make sense.

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It might seem easy to simply intuit the structure of the human body, but it's much complicated than it seems. There are certain relationships and proportions that you won't pick up on unless you study them. Understanding these aspects of actual human anatomy will help you learn how to draw manga bodies.

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Even if you plan on heavily stylizing characters in the future, understanding real human anatomy will help you figure out how to draw manga characters well. It will give you an idea of what the effects of stretching out a torso or broadening shoulders will have on the overall body.

Use References

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It takes up extra time to use references, but it's a great idea. Use them for poses, props, environments, expressions, and even gestures. This will provide you with a lot of details that are easy to miss even if you have a really good image of the drawing in your head.

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You'll get a sense of how weight sits and how a moment effects other parts of the body. This will help you a lot to create better-looking manga drawings.

Avoid Copying Favorite Images

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It's a good idea to study the works of your favorite manga artist, but you should avoid copying them. You'll end up copying their flaws, as well. It's important to study their art and understand why some elements work and some do not.

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Copying someone else will also stunt the development of your own art style. If you look at different manga art styles, you'll notice that they all bring their own spin to the style. As you learn how to draw manga yourself, you need to figure out how you want to express the style. Just copying other will keep you from doing this.

Learn How to Take Criticism

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It's hard to learn how to take criticism, no matter how long you've been drawing. Remember that you're always looking to improve. Even highly successful manga artists want to get better. Pay attention to the critiques you get.

Avoid ever saying "it's just my style". Your style could be wrong. It could be failing to convey what you want it to. As you continue to learn how to draw manga, you'll be able to tell what critiques are actually useful and what are just people being annoying or mean.

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On top of this, don't listen to your friends and family. They will tell you what you want to hear. They care about you and want you to be happy. Take their praise for your manga art as a sign of that they like you, but don't treat it like art criticism. Look for art critiques from people who will be honest with you.

See if you can find others with a similar interest in manga art to offer critiques. Since they are often looking to improve like you are they'll probably be happy to hear your criticism as well!

Don't Take Shortcuts

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If learning how to draw manga hands or feet is challenging, don't avoid doing it. Draw the parts of the body that you don't want to. Don't have draw characters only from the waist up and don't hide the hands or feet.

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These shortcuts will keep you from improving on your problem areas. They're basically excuses to keep you from working to improve. If you want to get better at drawing something, practice it whenever you get the chance.

Try Drawing Different Characters

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It's tempting to keep drawing the same manga character at all times. Everyone has certain types of characters they're more comfortable drawing, but staying inside your comfort zone is limiting.

You may have started out learning how to draw manga girls and manga girls alone, but you will hit a point where you can only improve by learning how to draw different kinds of people. There are a limitless number of people you can draw. Don't get stuck in one rut because you think it's your comfort zone.

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If you're also drawing environments, animals, objects, and even whole scenes, approach it the same way. Don't just stay with the things you're familiar with. Expand your repertoire. If you're looking to become a professional manga artist, or just think you might want to draw different kinds of things, you to learn how to draw different things for your wide variety of characters to interact with.

Practice, Practice, Practice

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Don't expect to create masterpieces after a week of learning how to draw manga. You'll need to work at it. It may take a long time and a lot of work. Follow the steps you see in manga drawing guides, create guidelines for every drawing, and work on things you have issues with. Most importantly, keep drawing. The only way to get better is to keep working at it. Don't get discouraged or frustrated by your own challenges or the criticism of others.

How to Draw Manga Step by Step

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Some tips About the Genre

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Manga is divided into two basic types: Shoujo and Shounen. Shoujo is more akin to a soap opera, often featuring pretty girls and more domestic situations. It focuses more on relationships and character development. Shounen is more action-oriented, playing out much like 80s action movies. The main characters are often muscular guys. There are big robots and huge fights.

Which style you're drawing for will affect the way you draw your characters. Don't treat them like limits, however, more like guidelines. They're basically a way of letting readers know what kind of story they're going to be getting.

Conclusion on how to draw manga

Learning how to draw manga opens up a lot of cool design options and a whole new avenue of art. It's a great thing to pursue as a hobby or even professionally. Take the basics detailed here and start practicing! Have fun, keep learning, and enjoy learning how to draw manga.

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