How To Draw Manga and Anime: Walkthrough 3

Here I am again with another walkthrough on how to draw manga and anime. I've been looking all over the web for different manga and anime tutorials and I'm always surprised by just how many ways there are of drawing manga and anime. Just when I'm thinking I've seen them all I'll find a unique style I'm not aware of. I advise you too keep looking for more tutorials and more references to help you, keep absorbing all the things you learn and improve your skills.

This is the finished product, it's just a rough work but I prefer rough looking artworks like these. As you can see, I didn't even clean up the line art. I lack the patience to create full colored renders majority of the time. Check out how made this using NekoPaint.

Part 1

Here I drew the basic head shape tilting slightly. I used NekoPaint's symmetry tool to make the basic body shape. Even though the character I have in mind is not standing upright, I drew this body shape as a reminder of the body proportion and measurements. Say for example I want to dress it with body fitting clothes, I'll know the contours of the body and draw clothes properly.

Part 2

I already had a hairstyle in mind so this part is fairly straight forward. Again when it comes to drawing manga and anime hair, just go wild and keep experimenting.

Part 3

Here I started on overlaying the clothes. I got the idea for the clothes and the pose from an image I saw a while back. It was a picture of a Japanese school girl and it kind of got stuck in my memory.

Part 4

Here I finished the clothes for the upper body along with the bag. Notice that I ended up with thick outlines, that sometimes happen when I'm experimenting with a look or when I'm having trouble with a certain part. I would keep drawing multiple strokes to find the right look. I don't think there's anything wrong with having dirty looking outlines, I happen to like it.

Part 5

Here we finish with the skirt and the legs even though here it looks like she's wearing jeans because of the overlay.

Part 6

Here I erased the body overlay to clean it up a little. I used the circular gradient tool to color the hair. I first used the selection tool to isolate the hair and then used the gradient tool like the one on the side.

Part 7

I did the same thing for the clothes. I usually use a gradient as a base instead of a solid color. I usually use just three layers of color, the base, shadows, and highlights. Very rarely do I make fully colored renders with multiple color shades.

Part 8

Here I finished adding color to the bag and skirt still using gradient.

Part 9

This is the last part. Here I added some basic shadows on the legs, face etc. I forgot to add highlights but I'm happy with how it turned out.

Thank you for visiting my blog and I hope you find this post useful.

You can download the images and the PSD file for NekoPaint here: http://www.fileserve.com/file/quVNwnB