There are many ways to start drawing manga. With this short guide, you will learn easy yet detailed step-by-step guidelines to get started with your manga characters.
From a beginner-level starting point to some of the best profound tips that even professional artists will find interesting.
Drawing is fun, and that’s the basic rule to keep you motivated. It will require some effort, patience, and persistence from you, but never push yourself out of the enjoyment of the drawing process.
1. Gather Ideas From Other Manga Drawings and Consider the Characters’ Details
Prepare yourself to relax and enjoy browsing a lot of characters in different styles. Start by searching for “manga/anime character design” images instead of final colored art.
Try to do it for at least 30 minutes before you attempt to draw something, and pay close attention to the main shapes and details, those soft and sharp curves, eye design, hair flow, proportions, clothing, and poses.
Your goal is to fill your brain with unconscious images that will be there for you when drawing later. Trust your brain!
2. Draw the Front Head View and Continue Studying Artist Sketches
Don’t fear the white canvas. If you complete the first step, your brain will be ready.
Follow this order to create a front view head: draw the jaw, eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, neck, and ears, then finish it with a hairstyle (see our guide on drawing many different Anime hairstyles).
Don’t be disappointed with your results. Remember that drawing should be something fun.
Look at your character head to identify what can be improved, then return to step one and continue studying different artist sketches.
Try focusing your observation on front view heads to fulfill your current goal. The trick is to go part by part.
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3. Build Your Guidelines for Easier Proportions
After drawing some front view heads, try creating guidelines such as a circle and straight lines to build a better head shape. Use these guidelines to identify how to draw it sideways, and quarter view.
Keep repeating step one to increase your brain observation for side and quarter head views.
You should be ready to move forward by drawing a complete body base shape as your main figure guidelines for male and female characters.
Use their heads as the size reference to achieve correct proportions.
Don’t worry about hands, feet, or details for this part. Just draw fairly good heads with a simple base body design in front view.
4. Draw Bodies at Different Angles With Naturality
Time to draw some bodies from different angles. Start with an observation from references, then adapt these to your guidelines. Doing so will grant you a clever understanding of proportions and the organic nature of the human body.
Complete the front, side, and quarter view sketching, even from the back. Then you’ll be ready to draw small movements. To do this, combine different angles and tilted parts of the body. And also move limbs based on references from drawings or real people images.
Don’t try to draw perspectives or top to bottom view angles yet. Focus your practice on a 360′ complete body understanding.
Every time you draw a complete body, review your results to find room for improvement by comparison with the reference proportions.
5. Draw Hands and Feet With This Easy Technique
It’s believed that hands and feet are not easy to draw. Here you’ll find a technique that makes a huge difference in drawing those complicated shapes.
Start by drawing a character’s face. On its side, draw a palm-faced hand using an image reference or your hand as the model. Make sure it’s half-face size compared with the head.
The technique is to draw hands and feet connected to parts you already draw well. Of course, you will need to use hands and feet reference images. Also, create guidelines to visualize the hands and feet’s movements and different angles or gestures.
Carefully observe the size of every finger, think in terms of phalanges or small cylinders, and focus your drawings on the most common hands and feet positions for now.
Finally, try drawing a complete body with hands and feet in different poses from reference drawings or real people images.
6. Draw Your Character’s Clothing and Accessories
Adding clothes to your character is easier when you have already drawn a base body.
Search for clothing references. These can be casual, school uniforms, occupation, or fantasy designs.
Clothing will be affected by gravity, fabric thickness, and constraints, such as joints pressure, environment, or pulling effects. The basic rule is to focus your clothing folds on joints with a simplified aesthetic.
When it comes to accessories like shoes, hats, collars, earrings, or even armor, emphasis is on showing the 3D nature of objects and their function details, the mechanism that makes them appear closer to reality.
7. Use Perspective & Understand Vanishing Points for a Great Manga Style
Imagine that you’re watching your character from the floor or a bird’s eye perspective. To draw a character like this, you will need more than regular references.
Improving your guidelines and understanding vanishing points is key to mastering the ultimate challenge for any artist, regardless of their drawing level.
The long way is to study perspective rules, especially the three points perspective layout. But since we are in the easy yet detailed guide to drawing manga characters, your best chance is to use 3D figures as references. You can get a wooden or plastic joints model or the digital version in many art apps.
Now take pictures, or place a pose for your 3D model to use it as a reference for your character drawing in perspective.
Drawing backgrounds will give you an advantage in understanding vanishing points and improving your characters.
8. Make Believable Fights and Relation Poses
Think of a scene that could be fighting, romantic, or anything that involves two or more characters. Now try drawing it with stick figures to understand the relationship and pose for every character. Use reference images from drawings or real people pictures.
To draw a fighting scene, use action lines for fast movements, blurry parts, and dynamic clothing and hair movements.
Head size and hand connections are the most relevant parts to match their balance and naturality that should fit accordingly.
An interesting drawing exercise is to match different ages and bodies in a particular scene. Try drawing a fat and muscular guy in a fight scene (use references).
To draw children and elders, focus on the head size and proportions distribution with special body features such as rounded curves for children and heavy bodies for elders.
9. Create Your Ultimate Manga Character Description
Our last step is to create the ultimate character sheet.
Write a complete character description like this:
- Name and race
- Age and gender
- Occupation
- Personality and traits
- Body description (height, weight, measures, marks, tattoos, scars)
- Background (write a story for your character)
- Life goal (write their personal goals)
- Virtues
- Weakness
Based on the previous steps, let’s create the character sheet with a front (could be a quarter) and back view with five different head angles and expressions according to their personality.
This character can be the beginning of your comic manga, webtoon, or a new universe directly from your mind to be materialized into art reality to share with the world. That’s the superpower of an artist – to be a creator of life.
Enjoy your drawings and leave a comment below!