Artist Insight 15 TIPS ON PAINTING MANGA FACES

I began my drawing career by learning how to draw manga.

During this time I purchased many how-to guides for creating this distinctive art style, and discovered that the drawing methods were similar to those of western comic art. Essentially, you’d use a pencil to draw the head shape and then add lines to indicate the eye position and centre of the face. Once this construction sketch is complete the final line-art is created using ink.

I followed the same drawing method when I first explored digital art with a Wacom Graphire that a friend gave to me. Yet I couldn’t get my hand-drawn line-art to look right and I had to use the Pen tool. The resulting line-art was clean, but it felt lifeless and lacked the energy that I would have wanted in the drawing.

After years of practice I gradually changed my method of drawing characters. Instead of working from a sketch and then moving to line-art before adding colours, I paint in greyscale, then adjust values and apply colours until