How to Draw a Beautiful Anime Girl: A Step-by-Step Tutorial
This in-depth tutorial explains how to draw a beautiful anime girl in 15 steps. The focus is on drawing a beautiful female anime character. In anime and manga, these characters often have roles such as the “pretty girl” at school and may not necessarily be the protagonist. However, drawing an anime girl to look beautiful is actually a bit of a challenge as most of them are drawn to be fairly cute by default.
Initial Sketch and Guidelines
Start by making a vertical line through the middle of your drawing area. The purpose of this line is to act as a guide that helps ensure that both sides of the head, neck, and shoulders are of relatively even width.
From the lower half of the circle, project two lines that are angled towards the center line. These should then transition into curves, followed by yet another pair of lines angled even more towards the center. Because the girl is drawn in an anime style and because the intention is to make her look beautiful, you want the lower part of the head to be fairly small. This will create a rounder face, and rounder faces tend to look cute. Also, be sure to make the curve of the chin quite small as well. This is an important little detail. At the same time, you don’t want to make it so small as to look sharp, as this will have the opposite effect.
Make the neck fairly thin in relation to the head and fairly long. As this tutorial mainly focuses on the face, it won’t go into too much detail on drawing these parts of the body.
Positioning the Facial Features
To position the eyes, draw a straight horizontal line through the middle of the head. You will want to place the eyes slightly below this halfway point. Drawing the eyes low down on the head will create a large forehead which can look cute and thus help contribute to creating a beautiful overall looking character. When spacing the eyes, you will want to leave roughly the distance of one more eye in between them. Make the eyes fairly narrow with thick upper eyelashes. Fairly high up above the eyes, draw the eyelashes with thicker and slightly raised inner ends. This will help give the character a slightly “innocent” look.
Read also: The Teacher-Student Dynamic in Anime
Place the nose slightly above the halfway point between the horizontal middle of the head and the bottom of the chin.
Make the mouth fairly small with a very slight downwards curve. Drawing the mouth in such a way will give a bit of “condescending” expression. However, this is offset by the “innocent” look created by the eyebrows. The end result is an expression that is cute but has just a slight hint of arrogance.
Position the ears with their tops slightly below the top of the eyes and their bottoms slightly below the bottom of the nose.
Drawing the Hair
When drawing the hair, you can think of it as being split into the sides, front, and back/top sections. Begin by drawing the “sides” part of the hair. Add the last section of the hair starting with a split at the top of the head and running all the way down to the shoulders (eventually going behind them). Draw its outline slightly farther away from the head as it goes up from the split and then gradually closer to it around the upper sides. The outline should then again get farther away as it goes down to the ears.
In case you are wondering why you needed to fully draw out the head and ears and not just start with the hair, there are several reasons for this. One is that seeing the exact size of the head makes it easier to place the facial features (as was shown in the previous steps).
Read also: Anime Student Councils
Adding Details
Going up from below the neck, draw the collar bones.
You can see a basic step-by-step drawing of the details of the eyes above. Continuing from their basic outline in step five, first add the pupils and reflections. Next, add hints of the eyelids and some individual lashes. If you want a black and white drawing, you can make the lower parts of the irises grey.
Add some folds to the hair as shown in the example above.
Finally, you can also add a little beauty mark/mole just slightly below one of the eyes (or other places). This will again help emphasize that the girl is beautiful, as some famous models have had these.
Coloring and Shading
Before you begin coloring the character, it’s important to note that if doing so on paper, you may want to leave some white spots for the highlights in the hair (see next step). For the actual color selection, you can go with many potential options. In this example, the girl has fairly light blonde hair and complimentary colored blue eyes.
Read also: Anime and Language Acquisition
For some very basic shading, you can add shadows in the most common place. Generally, you would get shadows like these when the light is coming from above (a very common setup in many scenes of anime and manga).
As mentioned earlier, you can also add some hair highlights as sort of white zigzag lines across the hair. If going with the second option, you can either use a white correction pen (if drawing on paper) or if drawing digitally add them in a new layer (depending on the software you use).
tags: #anime #girl #drawing #tutorial
