Tag: Drawing Tips

Looking at my old anime watercolor paintings reminded me of how I use to love drawing manga. I grew up watching anime, and loved drawing those sexy female characters. It was difficult for me draw back then. The proportions and foreshortening is very tricky on anime faces. It’s a lot easier for me now as I am a better artist today. Having said that, I think my improvement comes from the fact that I have modeled quite a few 3D anime faces earlier in my career in 3D graphics. That allowed me to better visualize the shapes in my head. And the more accurately you are able to visualize it in your head, the better you can translate that to paper.

There is a popular series of manga drawing books titled How To Draw Manga. I use to carry some of them in my eBay store. This How to Draw Manga series has countless volumes, covering every aspect of manga drawing. But seriously, you don’t need any specific training to draw manga, you just have to know how to draw. And people tend to think that manga is easier to draw because of its simple lines and shapes. But don’t be fooled by their simplistic style, they are difficult to draw, like anything else.

Here is a quick video of my manga sketches.

I remember I hated drawing hands. To avoid drawing them, I would pose the characters that I was sketching in a way that would have their hands hidden. That saved me a lot of time by not having to draw all those joints and fingers. Now I know what a mistake that was. I did not realized then that I was depriving my character of their expression. It was only through learning and doing 3D animations did I realize the fantastic expressive nature of the hands.

In many examples given in animations, especially from the traditional Disney animators, they show how just drawing the hands and feet alone gave more expression to the character than with the whole body without the hands and feet. In this sketch of Mickey Mouse, notice how the hands and feet alone tells so much about his pose and expression. You can feel the action with just the hands and feet.

The hand with all its fingers, joints, and planes, is a very difficult part of the body to draw. I struggle with it all the time, but when I spend the time on it and get it right, my drawings and characters comes to life. It is definitely the area to concentrate on for your drawings. On my quick sketch of the hand above, you can see how expressive that hand gesture is. With just one hand, you can feel the movement. I feel that the hand (the person) is contemplating.

To practice drawing the hand, you can look for images or better yet just take a picture of your own hands. In whatever lighting situation you might have for the photo, I do recommend that you have enough contrast in your scene. That will help to bring out the complex forms. That means you need to a smaller light source and not large area lights. If the lighting is too flat, the details will get flooded or washed out by the large area lights, making it harder for you to see the forms. Okay, now I am going into photography so I will stop now=).

If you are not doing so already, definitely put more attentions to the hands and feet. It will pay off big time.

Previously I talked about the necessity of drawing from references. This time I want to push it even further and suggest that you trace as well. I am not suggesting to flat out trace something when you are still in school or just learning to draw. I mean to use tracing in order to speed up your drawing process when you are already able to draw by eye. This applies mostly to portrait drawings.

Say you want to do a portrait drawing of someone. Obviously you would want your drawing to LOOK like the person you are drawing. And most artist would tell you how difficult that is. The face is extremely complex and if you have enough of their proportions wrong it won’t look like that person. You can start sketching by eye and eventually get to a point where you think the proportions and features are all in the right places. Then you spend hours shading only to realized that something is off. Now you are screwed. A more efficient way is to trace and make some reference points for the main features at the beginning.

Making reference points will ensure that you have the correct proportions to begin with. Now you can draw in the rest and feel SAFE that it will look like that person if you shade it correctly. You can trace as much of the features as you like. People generally do not care if you have traced it or not. But they will care if it does not look like the person you are drawing. So spend the time making the drawing look and feel the way you want it to, not hours on getting the proportions correct.

Lastly, most people do not look like Charlize Theron or supermodels, so take some liberty with the features and make the person you are drawing Prettier!

The Tracing Process
Since most of my portrait drawings are from digital photos, I will make a simple black and white printout of the face. This usually takes several tries as I need to scale the image to the exact size that I want to draw at. Then once I have that printout with the correct size, I will trace and make some reference points with my lightbox. My lightbox is only about 9 x 11″, but it is big enough as I just need some very simple reference points for the corner of the eyes, nose and mouth. Most of the features I can fill in. Just some simple points and it saves me about half an hour of going back and forth with the proportions. I don’t do this often as most of my portraits drawings, like the Model 1 drawing, are just for fun so I don’t need great accuracies. But when I do need it, that is what I do.