Manga Style Drawing Tutorial

Tutorial: How to Make a Manga Style Drawing

Like any other drawing technique, manga requires you to spend some time learning its basic principles. Once you do, and with a bit of practice, you'll soon be able to draw your own Japanese-inspired comic! But before you get there, start by learning the codes of manga style drawing. With their huge eyes, strong expressions, and wild hair, manga characters are especially fun and easy to draw. Here's how to do it in this detailed tutorial!

Manga Style Drawing: Creating the Character's Body

In a manga style drawing, you always start by sketching the character's body structure:

1. Start by drawing a simple circle above a vertical rectangle.

Note: Leave about a 1/2 centimeter gap between your rectangle and the circle. This space will be used to draw the character's shoulders and neck.

2. Draw a straight vertical line down the middle to split your shapes into two equal parts.
3. Inside the rectangle, draw an upside-down triangle whose point stops at 2/3 of the rectangle. This space will be for the upper body.
4. For the lower body, add a half-circle inside your rectangle to fill the remaining space. This half-circle will help you form the character's hips in your manga style drawing.
5. Using simple lines, now draw the arms and legs, then add eight temporary circles to mark the joints, hands, and feet.
6. Once done, you can draw the outlines of the arms and legs, as well as the neck and the whole body. Also, erase your various guide lines (which you should have drawn lightly in pencil). The body is now ready to be dressed however you like!

Manga Style Drawing: The Face

To draw your character's face, use the circle you drew earlier.

1. Draw a vertical and a horizontal line so they cross at the center of the circle. The vertical line is the guide for the character's chin. The horizontal line is for the eyes.

Note: In a manga style drawing, the chin is usually drawn in a more or less triangular shape.

2. Draw a new horizontal line halfway between the eyes and the chin to mark the bottom of the nose.

Note: In general, manga noses are very simple, made of two dots for the nostrils and a more or less curved line for the bridge.

3. Draw another line equally spaced between the bottom of the nose and the chin to place the mouth. In manga, the mouth doesn't need much detail. A simple line is usually enough. However, add a shorter line under the first to form the shadow of the lower lip. For a female character, you can add a few simple curves to give the mouth more volume.

The Eyes in a Manga Style Drawing

Eyes are super important in a manga style drawing! Here, the eyeballs are especially large and take up a good part of the face.

1. Start by drawing two circles, a bit taller than they are wide.
2. Draw the upper lash line of the eye, then another line at the bottom of the circle for the lower lash line.

3. Go back to your top line and extend it to suggest how the upper and lower lashes meet (without actually connecting them). This outer curve can be thicker depending on the type of lashes you want to give the eye.
4. Thicken the lashes at the outer corners of the eyes, and make them thinner on the inside.
5. Place the eyelid above the eye. The line can be more or less pronounced depending on the effect you want. A slightly curved horizontal line is enough here.
6. You can now erase your guide circles to place the iris. In a manga style drawing, the iris isn't necessarily round. It can be taller than it is wide, oval-shaped. This helps accentuate the character's expression through the eyes. Like the eye itself, the iris should be drawn extra large.

Note: The iris outline goes under the lash lines. So don't just draw an oval floating in the middle of the eye—make sure it's fully included in the eye structure.

7. Now put the pupil in the center of the iris. Here, the pupil shouldn't be round, but elongated to match the shape you gave the iris.
8. Essential in manga style drawing, now add highlights in your character's eyes. These aren't limited to the iris, but should be present on the whole eyeball. Don't hesitate to make them overflow. Usually, the light source is imagined above the character, so highlights above the pupil are often bigger than those below. The shape of these light spots can be round, oval, or even triangular.

9. Now that your eyes are ready, all that's left is to draw the eyebrows. In manga, these are usually long, thin, curved lines, with no extra frills. Of course, depending on the effect you want, you can make the eyebrows thicker or give them a more classic shape.

Note: In manga, ear size usually matches the area between the bottom of the eyes and the eyebrows. In a front portrait, two slightly rounded rectangles stuck to the skull are enough to represent them.

Manga Style Drawing: The Hair

In all types of portraits, whatever the style (hyperrealistic, realistic, cartoony, caricature, manga…), the artist always starts by outlining the area where the character's hair grows. The hair covers the whole upper part of the head and can come down to the eyes. In fact, a common beginner's mistake is to place the eyes and hair too high on the character's head. In reality, the hair takes up a third of the total head area. But you shouldn't have a problem here if you followed the previous face drawing steps.

Next, the artist chooses the starting point for the hair: a part, a cowlick, a point at the back of the head, etc. Once that's done, you can choose the type of hair and the movement of the locks.

So, even in a manga style drawing, these basic principles apply to form the hair. There's a small difference here, since the natural movement of the hair is greatly exaggerated in this type of drawing.

Here are the steps to form your manga character's hair:

1. Analyze different hairstyles from photos before choosing one for your character.
2. Precisely determine the starting point of the hair locks, as this completely determines how they fall.
3. Start by drawing a few locks, giving them the desired movement (wavy, straight, curly…)
4. Then gradually accentuate the volume and the spikes of the hair.

Note: In a manga style drawing, you rarely focus on hair details. Most often, you just keep the overall shape.

Conclusion

Manga is a drawing style that's especially popular, and many beginner or experienced artists want to reproduce it. By following the tips in this tutorial, you'll soon be able to create the characters for your own manga. As long as you practice regularly. In fact, one successful character isn't enough to make you a true mangaka!

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