17 tips for drawing manga faces

manga faces
(Image credit: Zakary Lee)

Manga faces are a vital part of drawing manga. 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.

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Zakary graduated from DigiPen Institute of Technology (Singapore) with a BA in digital art and animation. He now works at Collateral Damage Studios.

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