Legend of Krystal Forums

So for this tutorial, I'm going to walk you through how to design an anthro character, pose the character and go from sketch quality to final quality. As this is the Legend of Krystal forums, these tips will be geared for sexy characters in sexual situations.

The basic principle behind this whole process is to break everything down into steps so that you don't have to make everything up all at once. Drawing works best when you are not thinking, get your thinking out of the way and then draw.



First, we must define some parameters of the character: personality, body type, animal species, and so on. Usually, I like to pick the animal first and let the features of the animal determine these things for the character. This isn't always the best way. If you are making a world with societes based on species, you might not want all fox-people to have the same personality and body type. If you are making a world with multiple species, try to pick a good variety of animals, like a good mix of carnivores, omnivores and herbivores; mammals, reptiles and birds; fast and slow; etc. If the type of animal is driving the personality and body type, a good mix of animals will give you a good mix of these as well.

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To help figure out the character plan, I find it helpful to draw some gestures of the animal species that the character is based on. I prefer to be super specific about the animal. For example, I've selected the Red Salamander, Pseudotriton Ruber. If I just looked for Salamander, I would get a lot of different species and the different shapes might be confusing as I study them. Find a bunch of pictures of your chosen animal for your reference. Try to find shots of the animal in different poses and from different angles. For a major project, it is also helpful to find some videos of the animal in motion.

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Once we have some reference images, select your best ones and make a gesture drawing of them. Gesture drawings are fast and loose drawings for capturing the general shape and mood of a subject. Or it can just refer to a drawing without the use of construction shapes. Most artists make gestures very squiggly and ungainly, but I cannot bring myself to do this.

Ultimately, you really just want to look closely at your reference images. I find that I'm never looking closely enough unless I'm trying to draw it. Look at your gesture drawing and look at the reference image. If yours doesn't look right, compare them and try to understand why. This will help you to better understand the look of the animal, and will alert you to the subtle features that you can use to make your anthro character more defined and more unique. Try to find features that are unique to your specific animal that will differentiate it from other animal characters or from a basic humanoid. If you have animation in mind, you also want to consider how the animal moves. Consider the agility of a shark compared to the agility of a gazelle or a falcon.

As you make your gesture drawings, really pay attention to the 3D shape of the animal. Consider what the animal will look like from any angle, not just how it looks flat on the page. I have made a few contour lines on these sketches to help show the 3D shape of the salamander, the groove along its spine and the flattened paddle tail.

After carefully studying the red salamander, I have made a list of features that make the salamander a salamander. However, a lot of what you will learn from the gestures will be purely visual and difficult to express with words, so don't get too caught up in list-making and remember to look at your drawings themselves to remember what you learned.



Now we move on to anthropomorphizing the animal. The trick here is to apply the various unique features that you discovered while gesture drawing while keeping the character "human" enough that your audience can still relate to it, or in the case of the LoK forums, jack off to it.

The trick to this, and the reason why anthro-art works at all, is that the brain only looks at certain features when sizing up another human being. This is why a centaur's horse body doesn't bother us, while the wrong kind of eyes can completely creep us out. The brain doesn't care about legs, but it does look at eyes for clues about another human's mood and to identify that human. Or, try to imagine what a human torso looks like from the side. It's tough. You've probably seen thousands of them in your lifetime, but the brain doesn't care what people look like from the side, it uses information from the front view to size up other humans and decide if they are threatening or sexy. The key features that the brain looks at to identify humans are the eyes and mouth on the face (just like a smily) and the shoulders and hips (or butt) on the torso. Altering these features can make the character look too alien. Bird beaks are tough to deal with on anthro characters for this reason.

Another interesting quirk of the human brain is that it has a thing for dogs. The human brain can identify dogs and dog body language almost as well it as it can humans and human body language, but still identifies dogs as non-human. This can be exploited by anthro-artists. Any time you've got an animal that's just too weird, trying mixing in a few dog features. Those bird beaks for example, work better if you treat them more like a dog's snout. In fact, a great deal of cartoon animals are really just funny looking dogs. Sonic the Hedgehog characters are very dog-like, especially Knuckles who has nothing to do with a real-life echidna, and Bugs Bunny's face is as dog-like as it is rabbit-like. To my mind, this is also a pitfall to be avoided. Lazy anthro-artists end up with simple cynocephaly, "dog-headedness", without any interesting animal features in their characters. Try to step it up and use more interesting identifying features in your animal character.

So in the case of our Red Salamander, features like the sideways eyes and goofy mouth make the salamander very unique, but they are not very sexy. The salamander has very short limbs compared to its body. The exact ratio of the salamander's limbs to its body wouldn't be very sexy, but short limbs within human limitation will look okay.

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Making a character unique is all a matter of comparisons. A tall character needs to be taller than someone else. So you need to establish some baseline averages for height, width, curvy-ness, leggy-ness, head-body ratio, shoulder-hips ratio and so on. So for this drawing, I have made a "Default Body" that will represent an average character. Once we have an idea of "average", we can add our unique details to get our unique character.

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Now we draw our new animal themed character next to the average character template. As before, think of your character as a 3D object, not a flat drawing. You can use construction shapes for this if you want, but I find it easier to stick with gestures for this step. Pick a neutral, easy to draw pose. Don't feel compelled to settle on the first thing you jot down. Try different variations, move things around, really spend some time with your character in this step. Stick with basic shape for now. A strong character design should be recognizable by its silhouette. Consider, a tiger and a leopard look different, even if you can't see which one has spots and which one has stripes.

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Once you have something you like, clean up your character sketch. Remove any crossed lines or feathered lines so that you can really see the character, and start adding details and surface features. And it's never too late to make changes, you can see that I shorted the length of the arms during this step. Don't worry about the character's mood and don't try any poses. The idea here is to show ourselves what the character would look like, so that when we draw the character in an expression or a pose later, we don't have to think about what the character looks like.

If you are doing a major project, like a comic or a lengthy animation, consider making a turn-around and reference sheet. A turn-around is a series of drawings of your character from multiple angles. A reference sheet often includes turn-arounds as well as examples of different facial expressions, different outfits, close ups of detailed areas and items or equipment that character carries. These are especially helpful in group projects. Exactly what you need in a reference sheet depends on the scope of your project. I'm not a big fan of doing this since I don't make projects that would call for it, but you can search for "character turn around" and "reference sheet" on deviantArt to see some great examples.



More to follow.

Let's talk about posing



The trick to good poses is to first isolate the pose from the character. We want to start out with just a pose, later will draw our unique character in the pose that we selected.


If you are new to art, I absolutely recommend that you use reference. If you are an experienced artist, I absolutely recommend that you use reference at least once in a while. Find some poses that you like with google images or redtube or whatever and draw them as stick figures or gestures first. Make sure you check references with real people in them so that you can develop a sense of what is physically possible or plausible in the real world. Cartoonists have a habbit of ignoring this which can lead to weirdness.

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A quick way to get some poses on the brain is to use a simple stick figure. I am not a big fan of this method because it tends to generate poses that are very flat, not very 3D, which can look unnatural later on, but it's a good way to start getting some ideas down, especially if drawing gestures is still difficult for you. If you start with the stick figures, at least give yourself a bar between the shoulders and the hips. Attaching the shoulders and hips directly to the spine will result in major headaches when you try to define your poses later.

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More gesture drawing. Same rules as when we gesture drew the animal. Try to understand the 3D shape of the pose and pay close attention to the proportions of limbs and body parts. Use body ratios to measure things and keep your proportions from wandering as you draw.

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Once you have some poses you like, draw them from different angles. This will give you some options to choose from and help you make your pose more 3D. Being able to think of subjects as three dimensional will be a major boost to your art quality, especially if you want to consider animation or comics.

I'm actually starting to use "invisible construction shapes" which is cheating. Let's explain how to use construction shapes before I go any further.

Construction shapes are an artistic tool to help you with poses and perspective. As I said at the beginning, the idea is to isolate the pose from the character, so that you can decrease the amount of information you need to think about all at once. Construction shapes should be easy to draw so that you can erase them and draw them again without feeling bad. There are a lot of ways to do construction shapes. The best way depends on how you like to draw and what you're drawing.

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This is a basic sort of construction shape to use for humanoids. You draw the skull, rib cage and pelvis, spheres for the shoulders and hips, and single lines for the arms, legs and spine. For anthros, I start with a human skull and then add a snout. Note that the head is not a sphere, the head is head shaped, you may want to practice this a bit. The + sign on the face signifies the vertical centerline and the position of the eyes. The exact position of the eye line wanders around a bit in cartoon styles, so play around with it and find one that you like.

Once you have made a pose that you like, draw a solid shape on top of the construction shape, and erase the construction shape underneath. You want to make sure that the drawing still looks good without the construction shapes, sometimes it does not.

I'm not a total fan of this method because I have a hard time judging distance on the single lines. On this image I think I got the arms a bit too long.

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Another way of doing construction shapes is to use ovals. As before, you want to make ovals for the skull, ribcage and pelvis, treat the shoulders and hips as spheres and this time use ovals or tubes instead of single lines for the arms, legs and spine. This method can sometimes end up looking a little flat. To deal with this try adding some contour lines to your ovals, a + or # shape on the surface. The contour lines should have some curve to them, if you have perpendicular straight lines, you're drawing flat, not 3D.

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Another method I've seen is to start with cubes. This is not fantastic for humanoids because humanoids have rounded edges, but it can give you a lot of information about perspective and shading. It's great practice if you're having trouble with 3Dness because it's a lot easier to detect 3Dness on cubes than on rounded surfaces.

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The more complicated a pose or perpective is, the more you need construction shapes. Don't expect to pose to be perfect the first time. Move things around, try different things, erase and redraw a lot to get the pose right.

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Now it's time to select a pose and draw it for real. I'm not using super complicated construction shapes for this drawing, but there's a lot of tuning and redrawing as I go.

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It's a little weird to draw the face sideways, so I turn the image over to work on it. The new perspective also points out some flaws in other areas of the drawing that I can fix.

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Once the pose looks right, start adding more body details and cleaning away unnecessary lines. I also got carried away and added a little scene behind her. I really should have planned that out from the beginning and taken measurements for it, but oh well, there it is.



More to follow.

These are helpful reads to me, thank you!

Finally, we come to the finalization process.



I actually find this a little tricky to explain, but I'll do my best. This stage is where your artistic style will really shine through, so this isn't the right way to do it, just my way.

We start where we left off, with our posed sketch. Before inking, we want the final sketch to be as final as possible. I like to say "don't think with ink". A big part of making your lines look good is to make what they call "confident lines". While inking, you don't want any double lines or fuzzy bits that make you stop and think "wait, which was the right one to ink over?" When you hesitate with these kind of thoughts, it will be visible in your linework and look bad, so don't leave any pitfalls to trip over in your final sketch. If you change your mind about something or spot a mistake while inking, change the sketch, don't try to go rogue with the ink. I also like to color my sketch blue, so that I can easily distinguish between my sketch and my ink.

Although using a drawing tablet is faster, inking and coloring is totally doable with a mouse. If you're using a program like Gimp, you can link your brush size to the mouse wheel, so you can quickly change edge widths. If you like vectors, you can use Gimp's vector pen tool to outline the sketch and Gimp can actually pretend to do brush dynamics with it. You can also use a full on vector program like Flash or Inkscape. With raster programs, I recommend scaling up the image while working to be much larger than you plan to display it. For example I work with these 800x800 as 3200x3200 images. This helps remove small jitters and little mistakes.

While inking, I start with a thinner line, just tracing over the original sketch. I have my tablet set up to decrease the brush size when I decrease pressure, so I can easily control the width of my lines. A thinner line is usually good for internal features, like the mouth or muscle definition, while a medium width line is good for the character outline. Once the medium and thin lines are down, I go over it again with thicker lines. You need to be careful with these, but you can place thicker lines on one side of the character, or in areas that would have a drop shadow to make your linework look a little nicer. If you plan to use color, you want to lay off the linework a little bit. Objects in the distance should have thinner lines as they get farther away. Actually, my medium and thin lines are a bit thicker than they should be for this picture.

Once the lines are down, you can add color. You want to make a new layer behind your ink layer for the colors. It is also helpful to make each new color a new layer. For example, you can see I have the skin's red base color as one layer, shadows on a different layer and spots on another layer. I also have the highlights on their own layer, but I think you get the idea. In the case of the spots, this means I don't have to worry about the darkness-lightness of each individual spot, I can just fill the skin with spots and let the shadow and highlight layers deal with it. I can also decide later to change the hue or value of the shadows, highlights, spots or skin without affecting the others since they are all on different layers. This is handy since it's hard to guess exactly what colors you want the first time. For cartoons with just a few bold colors, this method works okay, but if you wanted to make a painting-style image, putting every new color on a new layer probably isn't feasible. Actually, only the salamander girl's colors are treated with this level of detail, the rest of the image is all on one layer. I used some linear gradients to give the color a little bit more depth.

When shading, remember that your subject is 3D. A humanoid body is basically a collection of spheres and cylinders, and will reflect light as such. I see a lot of people try to shade in people like they were microsoft buttons. This is not correct. If you are having trouble imagining what the shading should look like, use a reference image. After all, we still have all those reference images of sexy salamander skin, there's no reason not to take a peek at those again for the coloring phase.

For cartoons, it's good to exaggerate a little bit. I like to shift the color from warm colors to cool colors as they decrease in value. For example, if I'm shading something red, the highlights will be orange, the midtones will be red and the shadows will be magenta, something green will go from lime green to green to bluegreen, and something blue will go from cyan to medium blue to deep blue or purple. In general, yellow is best for lightest colors, purple is best for darkest colors, but there's room for experimentation as well. Cyan is also good for drop shadows or slightly dark areas. Adding these color shifts will make your images more lively and playful.

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Might talk about composition later.

Awesome. Thanks a bunch.

Post Moar! It's been a year, can ya believe it?

Actually, I've made a few drawing related videos for my patrons on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/acethesupervillain Most of it's about 3D stuff, but I just finished a pair of videos about making art like this one.

Awesome patreon. Congrats on filling your $100 slot, too. I'll consider supporting you for those tuts, too.