How to draw anime and cartoon characters

You're not drawing a face, you're building a head

Almost every beginner draws the outline of a face first, then tries to fit eyes and a nose inside it. That is why the features end up crooked, the head goes flat when it turns, and every character comes out looking like the same person.

Real illustrators do the opposite. They build a three-dimensional object first, in light throwaway lines, and only then hang features on it. The whole craft is that order. Construction first, decoration last.

So this guide is built in that order too. Light lines, then structure, then the face, then the body, then the fun part where your drawing turns into a song.

The light guideline method

This is the one I start with every single time, and it turns out to be a hundred year old professional convention with a real mechanical reason behind it.

Comic and animation artists roughed their drawings in a pale cyan pencil called non-photo blue, hex #A4DDED, then inked the real line on top in black. The reproduction camera physically could not see the blue, so the rough disappeared by itself. Nobody erased anything, ever.

That is the part that actually unlocks beginners. Erasing after every stroke kills your momentum, hides your wrong attempts so you never learn the difference, and turns every single line into a decision you can fail at. A pale underdrawing removes the stakes, so you get to be sloppy on purpose.

1. 🩵 Pass one, the rough A pale colour, drawn fast and loose, whole figure, zero detail. Big shapes only, thirty seconds to two minutes. If your app has layers, use a normal sketch colour on a layer at 25 to 35 percent opacity. If it doesn't, just draw literally in a pale colour.
2. ✏️ Pass two, the tie-down Go over the rough, still light but tighter, picking the correct line out of the mess. This is the pass beginners skip, and skipping it is exactly why their line art looks like a traced scribble. Rough down to 20 percent, tie-down at about 50.
3. 🖊️ Pass three, the final line Full opacity, confident, long strokes, no hesitation. You are tracing a decision you already made twice, which is why this pass can be fast.

The rule to hold onto: each pass is darker and slower than the one before it, and each pass has fewer lines in it. If your final pass has more lines than your rough did, you have done it backwards.

Build the head in five moves

This is the Loomis method, from Drawing the Head and Hands, which is free to read in full on archive.org. Every quote below is from the book itself.

1. ⚪ Draw a ball, then flatten the sides The cranium is a ball with "a fairly thin slice" taken off each side. Those flats are the temples. This is the skull only, not the whole head.
2. ➕ Wrap a cross over it One line down for the centre of the face, one across for the brow. Draw them curving over the surface of the ball, never flat and straight, and keep them perpendicular where they cross. That crossing point sits between the brows and Loomis says it "remains always fixed. All measurements spring from this point."
3. 📏 Mark three equal spaces From the brow line, go halfway up to the top of the ball: that's the hairline. Measure that same distance down from the brow: that's the base of the nose. Measure it again: that's the chin. Loomis, word for word: "it is one, two, three spaces, all equal, down the middle line of the face."
4. 🦴 Wrap the jaw around The jaw connects "about halfway around the ball". It does not hang off the front of the circle like a bucket, it wraps around the sides.
5. 👂 Drop the ears in last Continue the brow line around the head and the ears place themselves. Ear top sits on the brow line, ear bottom sits on the nose base line. One ear is exactly one of your three face units tall.

When the head turns or tilts, only the cross moves, and it moves like it is painted on a ball:

Anime proportions, with the real numbers

Anime takes a realistic head and does three things: it grows the cranium, shortens the lower face, and enlarges the eyes while simplifying everything else. Loomis's three equal spaces collapse, and the eye line drops from the realistic halfway mark to roughly 55 to 60 percent down the head on a young character.

These are style conventions, not anatomy, so treat them as dials rather than laws.

The eye, in build order

1. 👁️ Upper lash line The thickest darkest stroke in the whole face. A shallow arc, usually heaviest toward the outer corner. Everything else hangs off this one line, so draw it first.
2. ➖ Lower lash line Thinner and lighter, often broken, and in many styles the outer corner is left open rather than closed into a loop.
3. 🔵 Iris, and hide the top of it A tall oval, not a circle. The top quarter to third disappears under the upper lid. A fully visible iris with white all the way around reads as shocked or unhinged, and beginners draw it by accident constantly.
4. 🌑 Shadow band The upper lid casts a shadow across the top third of the iris. This one move is what makes an eye look drawn rather than stuck on.
5. ✨ Two highlights, not five One big highlight in the upper iris on the side the light is coming from, one small one diagonally opposite toward the lower side. Stop there.

Everything else gets simplified hard. The nose becomes a single mark, a dot or a small wedge on the shadow side of the centre line, sitting roughly midway between the eye line and the chin. The mouth is one line, an eye width or narrower, about halfway between the nose mark and the chin. Eyebrows are one tapering stroke, often floating clear of the eye with a visible gap, which is a distinctly anime choice.

The fastest lever for "older" is narrowing the eye and lowering the brow toward it. The fastest lever for "younger" is growing the cranium and dropping the eye line.

Hair is clumps, not strands

If you draw hair strand by strand you get a helmet or a wig, every time. Hair is a set of solid wedge-shaped clumps growing from one point on the skull, and the fix is just changing the unit you draw in.

1. 💀 Draw the bald skull first Ball, cross, jaw. Always, no exceptions. You cannot place hair correctly on a head you haven't built.
2. 📍 Mark the crown One point, usually off-centre and in the back third of the top of the head. Every clump flows outward from there. Dead centre partings are much harder to make look natural.
3. 🧱 Block three masses Fringe, the two sides, the back. Get the overall shape right here, because this is the silhouette and the silhouette is the character.
4. 🪶 Split each mass into 3 to 5 clumps Draw each one as a long wedge or ribbon, wide at the scalp and tapering to a point, usually curving. Two strokes per clump. Group them in odd numbers, because even pairs read as symmetrical and fake.
5. ✨ Detail last and sparingly A few internal lines only where clumps overlap each other. Then add the shine band: a broken zig-zag highlight wrapping the curve of the skull in the upper third of the head. Follow the skull, not the outline of your drawing, or the head goes flat.

Measure everything in heads

You draw the head first, then stack that exact measurement down the page. Japanese art instruction calls this toushin. It is the only body measuring system you need.

Loomis, verbatim: "A normal person will fall short of our ideal by half a head, he will measure only seven and a half heads instead of eight." The landmarks on that 8-head figure, measured down from the top of the head:

The minimum anatomy you can get away with

Forget muscles entirely. For a stylised character the body is a ribcage box, a pelvis box, and a bendy spine between them. The ribcage is about 1.5 heads tall, the pelvis about 1, and the half-head gap between them is where all the bending and twisting happens. Every pose you will ever draw is those two boxes tilting against each other.

Feet are a wedge: tall at the ankle, tapering to the toes, about one head long. The inner edge arches up off the ground and the outer edge stays down, and that one asymmetry is the whole difference between a foot and a block. In anime a shoe usually replaces foot anatomy anyway, so a wedge plus a sole line gets you most of the way.

Six mistakes and the fix for each

Draw inside Play Music Theory and your drawing plays itself

Play Music Theory is a free browser instrument by the animator Tala Rae Schlossberg. You draw on a canvas, a playhead sweeps across it, and wherever it crosses your ink, notes sound. It's free on the web with no signup, the iOS app is $1.99, and a $4.99 unlock adds key and scale choice plus WAV and MIDI export. Everything below works on the free web version.

Here's what is actually happening under the canvas, because once you know it you can draw for the sound instead of hoping:

1. ↕️ Up and down is pitch There are 32 pitch rows, top is highest. The free version locks you to C major pentatonic across three octaves, which has no half steps in it, so you literally cannot draw a wrong note. Everything you draw is in key by construction.
2. ↔️ Left to right is time The canvas is 48 columns on a desktop window and 24 on a phone, so a phone gives you a tight 4 second loop and a desktop gives you a roomier 8 second one at the default 120 BPM.
3. 🎨 Each colour is a different instrument Nine colours, nine voices: green keys, orange-red pluck, purple bell, amber marimba, blue flute, pink strings, light blue chime, near-black bass, tan 8bit. Pick by how the sound behaves, not by how the colour looks.
4. 🔢 The numbered dots are backing tracks Bass, drums and an arpeggio, stackable, and they follow the key automatically. Turn all three off while you're learning the mapping, then add one at the end as a finishing move.

The mechanism that drives everything else: at each column the app finds every row your stroke touches, groups them into connected clusters, and plays the middle of each cluster, up to three per stroke. Which produces one very useful and completely counter-intuitive result.

Where to draw and where to practise

You do not need to spend anything. One pick per situation so you don't have to choose:

Being honest about one of them: ibis Paint X gets recommended everywhere as free, and it is, but it's ad supported with a $4.49 a month premium tier and a lot of the good parts sit behind it.

To practise and to learn

• Read: Andrew Loomis, free and complete on archive.org. Fun with a Pencil is the friendliest starting point, then Drawing the Head and Hands and Figure Drawing for All It's Worth.
• Practise: Line of Action for timed poses, faces and hands, free with no account. Also Quickposes and SketchDaily Reference.
• Follow a curriculum: Drawabox. Every lesson is free, no account. Only the official critique is paid, and their Discord does free community critique.
• Watch: Mark Crilley for anime and manga specifically, and Proko for construction and anatomy.

Thirty minutes a day, and that's it

Skill here comes from short repeated sessions, not long occasional ones. Three ten minute blocks, daily:

1. ➰ Ten minutes of gestures Twenty poses at thirty seconds on Line of Action. Line of action only, no detail.
2. ⚪ Ten minutes of balls and crosses Twelve heads at twelve angles. Ball, cross, jaw, no features.
3. 🎯 Ten minutes on one thing Pick one: eyes, hands, or hair clumps. Only that, for the whole ten minutes.

And do all of it in light lines you never erase. The pile of wrong attempts sitting next to the right one is the entire point, because that contrast is what your eye learns from. Nobody gets better by erasing the evidence. 💌