How To Animate An Anime Character

January 28, 2022

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Sketching An Anime Body

How to animate an anime character in TVpaint: Part 1

1Draw a stick-figure outline of your characters body. Use straight lines for the arms, torso, and legs. Make the arms and torso similar in length, and make the legs about 1/3 longer. Then, draw triangles or ovals for the hands and feet. Make the hands about 1/5 the length of the arm, and make the feet about 1/6 the length of the legs.XResearch source

To get the proportions right, make your stick-figure outline about 7 times as tall as your characters head.

Have the arm lines start about 1/5 of the way down the line you draw for the torso.

Have the stick-figure outline of your character capture whatever pose you want them to be in. For example, if you want your character to be sitting, draw their legs so they’re bent. Or, if you want your character to be waving, draw one of their arms so it’s bent.

2Outline the general shapes of your characters body. Drawing over the stick-figure outline you made, sketch a rough outline of your characters torso, arms, hips, and legs. Dont worry about making the outline precise yet. At this point, you just want to represent the different parts of the body with basic shapes.

Draw ovals for the upper and lower arms and legs, and then draw a circle at each joint for the knees and elbows. Proportionally, make your characters upper and lower arms the same length and size. Make their upper legs thicker than their lower legs.

To outline the hips, draw an oval over the point where the torso and upper legs meet.

Anime Character Face Drawing Step By Step

To draw any of the characters in this tutorial you can use the steps in the above illustration.

Draw the basic shape of the head starting with a vertical line to help you make sure both halves are even

Positioned the facial features as described earlier including the parts that are hidden by the hair

Draw the hair

Erase the parts of the face hidden by the hair and if you like apply some shading or color

For an explanation of why you want to draw this way and other helpful drawing tips see:

How To Start Drawing Anime: 25 Step

Learn how to draw anime with this guide and tutorial including anime eyes, hair, girls and more. Take classes and get started with animation.

.Anime, which refers to hand-drawn or digitalized animation, has taken off in recent years as more and more fans are drawn to its unique artistic style and storylines. Anime characters are known for having big emotions and expressions and, as such, people across the globe are becoming increasingly interested in learning how to draw anime.

To help in your own anime drawing endeavors, weve compiled a list of classes and tutorials to help you with everything from how to draw anime step-by-step to how to take your art digital and develop your own unique characters.

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A Lack Of Time Should

not stop your MESSAGE

We get it. Life gets in the way and it can be intimidating to take the first steps alone.

And when we have the time, it hurts to think that maybe we are absolutely useless when it comes to drawing or animation.

Itâs not lack of information YouTube has lots of tutorials. Itâs lack of time YouTube has TOO MANY random tutorials, you need an eternity to check them all.

What software should you use? How do you create original characters?

And if you are lucky, you might find 3 or 4 that really make sense after hours of searching.

Drawing A Happy Tough Anime Character

1. How to Create Advanced Characters in Anime Studio Pro ...

As already mentioned these types of characters can be fairly emotional and are as likely to easily be happy as angry.

For a happy/content face draw the tough girls eyes fully closed. Basically a set of curves with eyelashes. Draw the eyebrows slightly flatter than normal .

For a detailed explanation on drawing closed anime eyes see:

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Important Steps To Draw Your Own Manga Or Anime Character

If you are looking to create your own manga or perhaps even your own animation you will probably have to draw and design at least one protagonist.

Even if you feel quite comfortable with your drawing ability properly designing a character that you will draw over and over can be challenging. The following tutorial offers some tips on the most important steps of making your own manga or anime character.

Drawing A One Eyebrow Raised Delinquent Anime Character

This is a face anime delinquent characters tend to make when gloating or bullying someone.

For this expression draw one eye squinted with the eyebrow over that eye lower down in a reversed curve. Draw the second eye slightly wider and with the eyebrow over that eye raised.

Draw the mouth in a sort of crooked smile with the teeth showing.

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How To Draw An Anime Body

This “skeleton”, though so simple, is actually half of the jobonce you have set the proportions the way you want, there’s not much you can do wrong! But a correctly drawn skeleton is just a skeleton, so let’s see how to fill it and create a body.

An anime body can be reduced to simple forms, like spheres and ellipsoids. They introduce another level of proportions, although they’re much looser and easier to keep right. It’s important to remember that although they look like circles and ellipses in your drawing, they’re actually 3D objects, and they are subject to perspective.

Monika Zagrobelna

Let’s take a look at the body parts separately. The torso still looks very much like an hourglass. You just have to remember about the tilting of the chest and hips towards the waist in the back.

The limbs are a little more complex, but still easily understandable. Just imagine them as the limbs of a drawing dummy! Also, pay attention to the joints.

Best Animation Software To Create Animes On Pc

How to animate a character in Anime Studio

Anime/animation software is the best solution to bring your characters to life with interactive videos.
If you are a professional in graphic design you definitely need an anime maker app for PC.
Adobe Anime, for instance, is one of the best know applications in this category.
Even if you’re new to this and don’t know how to make anime/animation, Adobe comes with many tutorials.

If you love anime movies and youre planning to create animes yourself, youll need a dedicated animation software.

Fortunately, there are many animation tools that offer you a variety of features that come in very handy when creating this type of animation.

Most of them, as youll see from the list below, will allow you not just to learn the art of animes, but also to enhance your creations with rich effects and lots of customizations.

So check out this list of the best anime software you can find on the market today.

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Drawing Anime Heads And Hair

1. Anime Hairstyles for Women

If youre focused on how to draw anime girls, Skillshare instructor Yanting Sun can help you create the perfect hairstyle for your character. She breaks the hair drawing process down by using simple, known shapes and reference photos.

2. Anime Hairstyles for Men

In this course, graphic novel artist Rush Hamden shows you how to draw anime hair on your male characters, from pencil sketches to traditional Japanese anime inking.

3. Simple Head Shapes

As Skillshare instructor Jay Dubb says, drawing is fun, but it can be frustrating. Save yourself the hassle and learn how to draw anime heads using his tried and true simple shapes methods. Hell show you how to create a character head using a circle, rectangle, and triangle.

4. Heads From Any Angle

When planning your anime drawing, it is helpful to have the ability to draw your characters head from any angle as they move and animate across the page or screen. In this course, Skillshare instructor Nina Rycrof shows you how to draw a head using a three-dimensional model and gridded axis points.

5. Anime Head Guidelines

If youre on the hunt for a precise guide to how to draw anime heads, Skillshare instructor Coffee Allens course will be helpful. Shell teach you how to sketch your anime characters head using a series of lines and measurements.

Dont Be Afraid To Fail

I know this may hurt, but being an artist is filled with failures and setbacks. Anime is no stranger to those who get frustrated, come up upon certain artistic roadblocks, and more.

Although it would be fantastic to start drawing world-class anime as soon as you pick up a pencil, it will most likely be a difficult journey getting the basics down naturally, and thats okay!

Dont be discouraged by failures or setbacks. Even the most talented and well-known artists struggled tremendously in their earlier days.

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Drawing An Angry Looking Anime Villain Character

This angry expression is one that anime villain characters tend to make when they are ticked off .

For the angry looking villain draw the top eyelids lowered and the bottom eyelids raised . Draw the pupils and irises small with no shadows and small reflections same as the previous example.

Position the eyebrows lower down in wave like shapes.

Draw the mouth in a sort of bean shape with the bottom ends curving slightly downwards and the teeth showing.

How To Draw Anime Characters Tutorial

This tutorial explains how to draw female anime and manga style characters using eight popular anime character archetypes with three examples of each.

As the name states this tutorial is all about character. It shows how you can take one anime or manga style face and tweak its features and expression to give an appearance of a different personality. It also suggests some hairstyles that may be well suited for each character type.

The character archetypes included are:

Ordinary Girl

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How To Make An Anime Theme Song

You know if you do make an animeone important thing to consider is the music. How many people can forget the themes to shows like SAO, One-Punch Man and one of the biggest Neon Genesis. Ive lived in Japan and A Cruel Angels Thesis is on the Karaoke list. To be honest I miss a ton of old school soundtracks we used to get in the 80s and 90s. It has been quite some time since weve seen a real soundtrack. I guess that is why Guardians of the Galaxy was so refreshing.

So when making your animedont forget.you need a good theme song.

Why Are Anime Eyes So Big

The main Reason is to convey emotions easier. This way animators could concentrate their efforts of the eyes when it came to showing emotions and didn´t have to animate the stance or pose of the Character to much.

This was cheaper and turned out to be a very effective method. It was also faster to animate only the eyes and not focus too much on the rest.

But money wasn´t the only reason. The Japanese culture was another one.

In the western world, we convey our emotions mainly through our body language and our mouth. Not by speaking but by smiling, frowning or screaming.

But in eastern countries, people don´t show their emotions as open as we are. They are either hiding their emotions behind their hand, by covering up their mouth for example.

Or they dont react in any way at all. This is seen as polite. So in Japan, for example, if you want to know what your opponent is feeling you will have to look in their eyes. Emotions can´t be masked as easily in the eyes. So Japanese people are used to looking in the eyes to read the emotions of others.

Another reason is that we are all positively drawn to big eyes. Big round eyes make characters look innocent and young. Just think back to the famous Bamby eyes.

This is the reason why bad characters in Anime, most of the time, have smaller eyes. This is not the case for all Animes but a lot of the older Animes used this trope a lot! Because it works.

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How To Draw Anime Characters

Many beginners choose anime/manga as their first drawing style, because it looks very simple and appealing. However, if you want to draw a manga character from scratch, you need to understand the proportions and structure of the body. And if you want to draw anime bodies from imagination, you even need to know human anatomy. So while drawing anime characters is easier than drawing realistically, it’s still not easy!

In this tutorial, I will show you the basics of drawing the bodies of anime characters. I’ll show you how to start a manga drawinghow to define a pose for your character and how to make sure the proportions are correct. Then I’ll show you how to turn this “skeleton” into a 3D structure and how to add muscles to it.

You’ll learn everything you need to know to draw an anime character from scratchthe gesture, proportions, forms, and anatomy. It’s all explained on a beginner level!

Drawing A Crazy Looking Anime Yandere Character

How To Animate Anime Style Run cycle – 2D Animation Tutorial

This particular crazy face is one a tsundere tends to make for someone she is obsessed/in love with.

For the crazy expression draw the eyes slightly wider than normal with small irises/pupils/highlights and no shadows.

Draw the eyebrows in upside down curves with the inner sides of the eyebrows raised.

Draw the mouth open in a sort of relaxed state . Remember to draw the chin slightly lower down for the open mouth.

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How To Get The Tiktok Anime Filter

Now to finally get down to business How exactly can you get the anime filter for your TikTok? Well, here’s the trick Despite having earned its popularity on TikTok, the Anime Style filter actually comes from Snapchat So, if you do want to animate yourself like you’ve seen all the other popular TikTok-ers do, you’ll need to record the video on the Snapchat App first and then upload it to TikTok.

Spreading Your Anime To Others

1 This is the easiest way to make fans. Your family and friends are bound to be supportive and they will probably share your work with others that they know. This can help you build a small base.

2Create a blog or website. Publishing your work on the Internet is a great way to start to build an audience. You cant expect to get paid for the stuff you create immediately, but if it becomes popular then you might be able to! Try to market your blog through social media by creating a Twitter and Facebook page for your anime.

3Contact a publisher. Try to find someone who is excited enough about your story and anime to consider publishing it. You can find a publisher near you online. Look for someone who specializes in anime and who has a history of getting other young artists started. Who knows, they might love your work.

4Send out your anime to competitions. If you dont want to send the whole story you can just send out chapters of your anime to shorter competitions. There are plenty of film and writing-related competitions that accept anime, as well as anime specific competitions that you can find online. Advertisement

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Coloring An Anime Character

Manga are often black and white but color is still used in some places .

For a tutorial on coloring an anime character you can see:

While you may have certain colors in mind for your character there is a very important aspect of coloring to be aware of.

Certain colors go better together than others. These are usually complimentary colors or colors across from one another on the color wheel . You can often see the use of complimentary colors if you look at the color schemes of popular anime characters. The colors dont need to exactly match those on the color wheel they can be a variation of a given color.

You should also pick colors that are appropriate for the type of character you are trying to create. Colors can give off certain moods. For example blue is considered a cool color while red is considered warm. So if lets say you want to design a fantasy character that uses ice magic you probably dont want to use a lot of reds in their design.

For a more detailed explanation of various color combinations see:

How To Draw An Anime Character

Tutorial: How to draw typical anime character (female ...

This article was co-authored by wikiHow staff writer, Kyle Hall. Kyle Hall works on the content team at wikiHow. He helps manage our team of editors and creates content for a variety of wikiHow projects. Kyle continually looks for new ways to improve the content at wikiHow and make it more helpful and enjoyable for readers. He graduated from Eckerd College in 2015, where he majored in Political Science. This article has been viewed 1,296,234 times.Learn more…

Anime is a popular animation and drawing style that originated in Japan. Drawing anime characters can seem overwhelming, especially when youre looking at your favorite anime that was drawn by professionals. Fortunately, anyone can learn how to draw anime characters, and the process is fairly simple if you break it down into small steps.

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