How To Draw Manga Faces Step By Step

Drawing the face is the most crucial point to any illustration. The face holds the capacity for expression, and therefore reveals the character's personality, thoughts, and desires.

I like to think of the face as the house of the character's soul. There is so much about an anime or manga character that you can show through the face.

For example, a scar on the face suggests that this character is battle-worn and a warrior. On the other hand, big, glistening eyes and unblemished skin imply innocence and youth.

Character attributes can be blatant or subtle. That's up to you. So have fun with it and play around.

Part of the beauty of manga art is that you can use facial features, expressions, and other graphical tools to convey your character's personality to the audience. Much of your characters background and temperament must be conveyed without using words.

Expressions communicate the ever changing emotional state of the character. Surprise, fear, anger, love, worry, and rage are all emotions revealed and highlighted by facial features.

For example, the eyebrows angled down portray anger; an upturned mouth signifies happiness.

In manga, these expressions are dramatically exaggerated, but they are simplified. These simplified lines increase the clarity of the images and send a stronger signal to the viewer.

The shape of a character's head can also be used to show age and personality.

Youthful manga characters have rounder heads and bigger eyes. As they age, the eyes become smaller and the head narrows and lengthens.

Ok, so here is how you draw a manga face:

Step 1- Draw a circle. This will be the head. Next, add the jaw. Make sure the jaw is symmetrical because we are looking at the face from head on.

Step 2- Draw a vertical line down the middle of the face. This will act as a guide for the eyes, nose, and mouth.

Step 3- Sketch the eyes and nose.

Step 4- Add in the details for the eyes. Don't worry too much about what they look like at this point. You'll learn to perfect your eye drawings as you progress.

Step 5- Add the eyebrows and hair. Have fun and experiment with the angle of the eyebrows. You'll find that you can make a pretty wide range of emotions just by varying the degree of the eyebrows.

Also, notice that manga ears are generally smaller than real ears and can stick further out.

After that, erase any pencil lines left over.

And if you'd like to learn more about how to draw people faces, head over to http://howtodrawpeoplefaces.org/.

You might also want to check out my article on human figure drawing. Knowing figure drawing will help you to draw better manga characters.

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