How to Draw Anime

Series Summary

Since the dawn of the Stone Age, drawing has been a primary method of human expression, one of man’s many tools of reflection and interpretation. But it wasn't until paper became widely available in Renaissance Europe that drawing masters, such as Leonardo da Vinci, could show the world what amazing things could be done with simple lines and shapes. Ever since, a growing number of people have embraced drawing in its myriad forms and applications: doodling, sketching, cartoons, caricatures, architectural blueprints, engineering, planning, inventing, modeling—and the list goes on. In this free video series on drawing, a professional illustrator and graphic artist, Jay French, explains how to draw a variety of different subjects. French describes the artist technique for developing all sorts of fun filled creations. He'll discuss how to draw anime, graffiti names, bubble letters, comic book characters, faces, eyes, caricatures and even Disney characters. Watch these free videos and learn to draw a variety of subjects today.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jay French, jayfrenchstudios.com, today I'm going to show you how to draw an Anime style. Alright, drawing Anime is mostly about people and robots. What we're going to do with people? In this case, we'll draw a little guy. Anime heads tend to be, the Anime style tends to be a little more exaggerated especially in making the heads larger on young characters and the head smaller on older characters. So we're going to do a young kid here and maybe I'll real quick show proportions on an adult. And this will show a more prominent cheekbones and prominent brows ridges. In a male, it's going to be a little sharper like this. The chin can be as sharp as you like, there's a variation of styles in Anime. You almost want your eyes, or your hair and eyes, 'cause that is very common Anime style. You also have pretty wild hair, that's common for Anime, so we're going to keep that up. Noses are very minimal, usually just pretty much a shadow of what is under the nose, the shadow under the nose. You don't actually see any of the lines of the nose itself. Mouths are very small and simple; your little shadow of that lower lip, that's all about you're going to see that. Now, one of the odd things about Anime is that, you will get overlap from the bangs that are very commonly, as I said, in the face and they'll, or it get overlap between that, in the eyes and eyebrows. Now the sidelines on the eyes are probably not going to be actual incline, you probably just want to do another division between the, if you're doing this in color, between the flash tone and the widesly eyes, just do the top and bottom lines as black lines. Irises are very large in Anime, you get a large highlight line in the pupil, I guess, that's part of what just Anime sets character. Eyebrows are usually fairly thin in male characters or sometimes a little thicker, can break the bounce, it's more stylished versions especially. Break the bounce of the, of the face edge. And that's your basic young character in Anime. The big difference from doing a, an older character or a more muscular character; I'm just going to draw some quick shoulders here to give you an idea, is that they will show a smaller head, it's one of the few times, as in heroic characters or in villains and you'll often see a very pointed chin, sometimes even then you'll actually going to broad the mouth than you'll actually see. It's still very minimal in the nose and even though the eyes will be very wide, they might be very narrow horizontally and probably a little box here. You may still have big irises and you can still have some crazy hair. So now we know what this kid's going to look like grown up. And there's a couple of subjects in Anime style."