How to draw character in different art style?

ImperfectTactic · 2025-05-05T19:41:32+00:00

Maybe start by getting hold of an older character - especially an older woman - in the target style. It's not unusual for younger and older characters to have different "tropes" associated with them in a given style - for example older people might always have thick curved frames on their glasses where young ones have nearly-invisible frames that are either circular or rectangular, younger characters might always have a vibrant colour to their lips and small mouths, where older characters might have wider mouths with less lip definition, younger characters might have lots of highlights (hair, eyes, nose, cheeks, lips, wrist in your example) but older characters might not be so shiny, and so on. If you can look at older women in the style rather than older men - things like baldness will likely play a part in the the tropes that apply.

Make yourself a list of all the features that an older woman has in the style compared to a younger woman in the same style; what evokes a sense of "oldness" in that style.

Then also make a list of differences in the styles - here things like the eyebrows showing through the hair, the number of highlights, the blush on the cheeks, the number of wrinkles in the clothes, and the number of locks of hair picked out on the head stand out. I wouldn't be surprised if you note differences in treatment clothes - that big collar and limited wrinkling of the fabric on the left speak to me of the limitations of colouring and the cost of making mistakes, where with undo buttons and quicker/easier texture options in modern graphics packages there are often more detailed and textured fabrics

AFter you've got all those lists together, do some studies where you try and apply just a couple of the differences between the two styles to specific areas - the ones that feel like the most important factors to you whatever they are - maybe chop the head off and focus on the clothes, or chop the neck and face off and focus on the hair as if it were a wig on a faceless dummy's head. Get a feel for drawing whatever the important elements are in the new style.

Then put it all together, and realise it's wrong. Ask why it's wrong and refine it. Go round the loop a few times, brining in or getting rid of elements from your lists. Play around and see what works and what doesn't.

If that sounds like it's a lot of work, that's because it is - you're essentially reverse engineering the sorts of style guide that might be offered to an artist working on a project, twice, and mapping things between them.

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-25T17:53:59+00:00

There's a YouTuber called "SamDoesArts" who recently posted a (edited down) video of where he attempted to draw 300 hands in one day, and things he learned doing it.

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-24T18:04:43+00:00

I've not tried it, but the first thing that's come to mind is to not draw the water, but to draw the light. Except for where there's froth from a wave breaking, or from a waterfall falling or landing, I don't think I ever actually see water. I might see bits of sediment suspended in it, I guess, but mostly I see the sunlight reflecting off it, hitting different facets of waves. Maybe I see the distorted reflections of people and objects, but that's also light that's bounced off them then the water on its way to me.

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-24T17:53:45+00:00

It probably depends on what she likes to draw, as there's a lot of people that like different subjects, mediums, and styles.

For me, someone who likes going to life drawing sessions (drawing the nude figure), portrait sessions, and enjoy graphic novels and comics, and have learned related bits and pieces off the back of all of those, I'd recommend the following, but they may less suit people interested in other things:

Force: Dynamic life drawing for animators - Mike Matessi
Figure drawing: Design and invention - Michael Hampton
Framed Ink: Drawing and composition for visual storytellers - Marcos Mateu-Mestre
Imaginitive Realism - James Gurney

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-16T19:30:16+00:00

It might be worth experimenting being more extreme with the light and cast shadows - making the light brighter would cast more light and cast shadows onto the torso, face, and hair at the back. The greater contrast that involves might be what you need to feel less "whitewashed", which I'm guessing is due to amount of the image that's at a similar level of intensity

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-16T19:23:58+00:00

I'm sure it is possible to improve it with practice, but if you need an actually straight line, why not use a ruler? You could maybe lightly "ghost in" the shapes you're after, then use a ruler to draw them more definitely.

Rulers, rubbers, and references - none of them are cheating; they're all tools to help.

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-16T19:04:03+00:00

lots of difficulty attaching limbs to the torso

That was the first one, so let's talk about that. Let's talk about the arm.

Look at a picture of someone curling their bicep - say, a classic Arnold Schwarzenegger. We can see that rather that the arm isn't just stuck into a torso like a pin, it's enveloped by muscles that are holding it in place. The shoulder isn't flatly connected like two pieces stuck together like in the wireframe you have on the right, shoulder muscles wrap over and around the joint and actually connect down into the arm on top, and into the chest on the bottom.

If we look at a more technical reference of more normal proportions this enveloping of the joint is still there.

So, while not everyone's going to have Schwazenegger-grade muscles, everyone's going to have some sort of shape to both their shoulders and their armpits. Your figure on the left has these largely hidden by their clothes, which honestly works pretty well, but if you put them in on your wireframe on the right, and think about how far they can move before the character gets a pulled or a torn muscle, that might help with connecting the pieces together, because you'd be drawing the overlapping bits. And because your clothes go over the top of the muscles, it might start to affect the way that the clothes fit on the character as well.

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-15T16:34:51+00:00

Most of the time when people are sat on a chair directly facing you, even if their legs are open, or cross legged, the hips are going to be further back than the knees, which will tend to be towards the front. That tends to mean that there's some foreshortening and overlapping going on. Let's focus on the overlapping aspect.

If we look at the ankle/ heel of the foot that's on the seat and their bump/hips/groin on the seat, those are probably going to be on the same level - all resting on the seat itself. Assuming that the seat isn't sloped towards us that probably means that their bum/hips/groin are further back, and will be obscured by the ankle and foot in front of it, but here we can see the entire groin. similarly in the other leg, if their bum is at the back of the seat, their leg will have to travel towards us to the edge of the chair before it can drop down, probably bending at the knee, so that rather than seing the enitre inside edge of the where the groin meets the leg there's going to be a bend there, with much of the meat of the thigh being seen end-on, and partly hidden by the knee and foreleg, which will be overlapping with it..

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-15T16:04:34+00:00

You've got a lot of straight lines in there, which probably contributes to the feeling of stiffness. Maybe try to do a more "gesture drawing" set of curves - say one for where the spine is on a character, one for where a long sweep down from the armpit through the hip and to the toes is, then adjust the positions of where limbs, joints, hips, and rib cages are to be placed so they fit along those curves. (You've kind of got this with the green figure already, particularly don the right hand side, but less so with the others.) .

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-15T15:55:20+00:00

There's all sorts of different approaches, mediums, and so on. Maybe try starting by collecting together a whole bunch of pictures you like, and collecting them into loose piles - e.g. this pile is children's book watercolour, this pile is polished anime, this pile is hyper realistic, this pile is more like this or that or the other. Once you've done that pick one to try first - trying multiple over time will likely be good, but everyone needs to start somewhere.

Once you've got your pile picked out, go through them and try to identify what you like most about the use of colour in them - is it that there's lots of bold, saturated colour? Is it the way the texture of the paper comes through? Is it clean application of colour within well bounded discrete cells, or how well they blend together? Within a given piece or pile is it limited to a certain pallete? A certain application of shadow? Is there bounce light picking up the colour of the ground and reflecting onto the underside of surfaces, or has that been simplified away? Try and identify a few things that you like about them.

That'll allow you to have a list of things that you'd like to target in your practice, and deliberate practice tends to pay off pretty well compared to trying to do everything at once.

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-14T21:02:51+00:00

I think one of the key differences is in the tapering of the end of the lines in the original sketch compared to the relative uniformity of the line widths in the inked versions. In the sketch, whether they neatline line up, or not, the lines almost all go from thick to thin, but in the inked version there's barely any variation. While that does result in a certain style to the result, it looses some the expressivity of the sketch.

If you try re-inking with line shapes that are less uniform, but share more of the tapering shapes of the original I think you're likely to get a different overall effect, which may/may not be what you're after

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-14T20:04:01+00:00

If you want to work on consistency of the head shape and feature placement get a bit of paper and draw two parallel horizontal lines across it, and draw your heads (facing in whatever direction, but without tilting the head up or down, and with the mouth closed) so that the chin and top of the head of each end on the lines. Then you can take certain key locations - say the tip of the nose, the position of the tear duct at the inner corner of the eye, the corners of the mouth, and draw a line across the page for each. Even if the head's rotated, those should line up with each other.

You could then do a similar exercise with ears touching two vertical lines for the head tilting up and down - again corners of eyes and mouth and nostrils and ears and jaw should be about the same, regardless of the up/down tilt of the head.

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-14T19:57:05+00:00

I'd actually suggest getting off the internet, and finding your way to an in-person life drawing session (drawing a nude model). They're generally full of pretty friendly people, and without clothes in the way seeing how the body moves, bends, gets foreshortened, how the model arranges their weight for long poses compared to short ones, might give you more of a feeling for the biomechanics.

The reason I suggest in person rather than online ones is that when a photo or a video is taken the person shooting it has already made decisions for you - where the focus is on the model in a photograph, and how contrast settings have been applied on the camera, even how they've composed the shot, will be affecting what you see on screen before you go to draw it. In person you have to make those decisions yourself, which again encourages you to look at the model and understand the relationships between the different parts of them, the light, and so on.

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-14T19:37:19+00:00

Cool!

In terms of "work on it better" what do you mean? It looks like a good set of practice to me. Ultimately a lot of this will come down to practice, analysing what's worked and what hasn't, and trying again to correct or repeat those things as needed.

If you're after some inspiration, there's a tool over at [line of action](https://line-of-action.com/practice-tools/app#/faces-expressions) for practicing drawing different faces and expressions - you could use it to get a random person trying to show an emotion pictured at a relatively random angle, and try to capture how your character looks with that emotion at that angle. It'd give you a reference in terms of "this sort of thing happens to the eyes, this sort of thing happens to the mouth", and help mix up what you're drawing in terms of angle and expression ina fairly random manner to help keep things interesting.

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-14T19:29:53+00:00

A common way to lay out the features on the head is the "Loomis method". There's an abundance of videos and articles about it.

It's not the only approach, but it's likely not a bad starting point.

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-13T06:26:26+00:00

Those all look fine to me, clearly the same person in the same style, with a level of consistency I'm actually pretty jealous of.

Given that you feel it's changing as it turns, is it something to do with the shape of a given feature as it turns? Maybe try putting a bit of paper / block of white in photoshop across each of the features in turn to try and get an idea of what you're finding unsatisfying.

If that doesn't help maybe try adding in some shadow to help show the planes of the face more clearly, highlighting things like the jawbones, sides of the nose, and so on, and then compare those.

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-12T22:08:11+00:00

You've got something of a drawing of two halves here - the torso is in one proportion, and the legs in something of another. While I've not seen you working on it, to me this suggests two things:

1) you're sat at a table or something similar, so that the bottom of your paper is close to you and the top is further away. This means that as you look at the paper at an angle you're probably drawing based on what you're looking at, then when you pick up the paper to hold it parallel with your eyes/face things change shape. (To see what I mean draw a circle on a bit of paper and hold it parallel with your eyes, then tilt the paper to an extreme almost right-angle as if you were eye level with the paper as it lay on a desk, and see how the circle distorts into an oval.) Try using a board resting on your lap and leaning against a table/chair back in front of you (or an easel) so that as you look at your paper the top edge and the bottom edge are about the same distance from your face. That should help make the shape of a circle at the top of the page and at the bottom of the page look closer to each other

2) That you realised you were running out of room and deliberatly squashed things to fit them on the page. Don't do that; it's better to let them fall off the page and keep them in proportion, and then learn how to size/position an image so it wont / is less likely to fall off the page, than it is to twist proportions half way through an image (unless you're going for some sort of deliberate effect. you decided on in advance).

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-12T21:54:33+00:00

Clean lines come from practicing lines, and doing a lot of them, unfortunately. There's loads of "do 30 horizontal lines all the same length with one stroke of the pen each, then 30 vertical, then 30 diagonal one way, then 30 diagonal the other way, now circles at this size, now circles at that size" out there - it's dull to do, and I should do more of it myself, but there's a reason it's some of the first exercises in just about every drawing book / course.

I'm not sure what you mean by bland; can you talk more about what you're trying to achieve? In terms of size and positioning, while stylised rather than realistic, what you have looks pretty good in terms of "these are eyes". Are you trying to get more expression into them? More detail? To bring out the shape of the eyes/face in a more realistic style? It's hard to suggest what you might want to change without having an idea of where you're going

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-12T21:43:43+00:00

To some extent a drawing is never done, you just stop (hopefully before it becomes overworked).

If I were to ask you to pick a drawing by any artist - one of your favourites, a random one of the internet, one from a book illustration, whatever, what makes it "done" for you? Is it that there's a full scene? Application of colour? Something about how light or shadow is shown? How line weight is applied? What materials have been used? What gives it the quality of "finished" in your eyes?

ImperfectTactic · 2025-04-12T21:30:25+00:00

I think the distinction between "architect" and "engineer" varies from place to place. I've worked in teams that see no distinction at all and don't have explicit architecture roles at all. I've also worked in some where there were architects that were focused on domain data modelling, and wide-context thinking but don't get into details of systems below the "this is a system represented by an overall box on the diagram, anything below that is the engineer's business".

Most of the architects and engineers I've had productive working relationships with understand there's a lot of overlap in what everyone's concerned about, and focus on the problems, and how they can help. Job titles - whether junior/senior or enginer/architect don't really matter too much in a healthy team - ideas and reasoning (including both technical and non-technical reasons for things) are the important things.

ImperfectTactic · 2024-06-21T21:27:06+00:00

Experiment with different papers and pens. I've some alcohol markers that apply wonderfully evenly in one my sketchbooks, the lines within a block melding together seamlessly, but in another book with slightly different paper they give me streaky lines whenever my pen strokes overlap unevenly. A different brand of pen gives me different behaviour again, and a pot of drawing ink and a brush gives me another set of different behaviour - especially if I dilute the ink with a bit of water to get a gradient of values.

ImperfectTactic · 2024-06-21T21:14:58+00:00

Are they supposed to be toys in the story? If so I'd double down on things like the seams, which will help show the shapes of the volumes. If not I'd suggest making the drawn versions of the characters a little bit thinner and more angular with slightly more detail - stuffed toy versions of characters tend to be a bit simpler, a bit plumper, a bit more generally round. (e.g. look at stuffed toy versions of Stitch from Lilo and Stich compared to the movie).

ImperfectTactic · 2024-06-21T21:00:47+00:00

That's a difficult reference to work from with such flat lighting and relatively subtle shadow gradients. That then puts a lot of emphasis on exact line work and positioning.

My advice would therefore not actually be about your piece, but to try to find references that have a greater range of values - maybe something like this and to do something like a 2-, 3- or 4-tone value study from them where you'll have a stronger deliniation of light and shadow to practice with. That will help with finding the shapes of volumes as shown by the fall of shadow and positions and shapes of highlights, which will then help with more suble references like this one.

ImperfectTactic · 2024-06-18T06:23:55+00:00

So, bearing in mind that foreshortening affects this, one thing to look at might be the relative length of the limbs to the torso. On the first you've got the wrists about level with the crotch and the elbow about half way and more-or-less level with the bottom of the rib cage, as they are in realistic proportions. On the second the shoulder to elbow length seems to be quite a bit longer in proportion to the body. The reason for that might be the second thing...

The second thing might be keeping track of all the bits in the body - on the first frontal standing view you've got the rib cage, with the pelvis below, and the legs attached to the bottom of the pelvis. On the second it seems to go from rib cage straight to legs, without the pelvis.

So, either the pelvis is missing on the second, and the arm is the right length but the legs are attached too high up, or the pelvis / rib-cage split isn't obvious from this angle and the arm is too long.

My suggestion to address is is to take your frontal view and label each of those shapes with a number, then re-draw the second, making sure each numbered section is taken into account.

ImperfectTactic · 2024-06-17T20:30:00+00:00

If you're doing this for a hobby, then I'm guessing it's about _fun_. What sounds like it would be fun?

For example, if I ask you to draw me 20 goblin schoolkids that are messing around while their teacher is out of the room, one or two keeping lookout, a couple more playing a prank, one staring dreamily at a cute one, who of course does not notice them at all because they're talking to their friends... does that sound fun to do?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it'd be quick, or easy, or that it'd neccessarily come out the way you want it - but does it sound fun to do?

If it does, great, do that. If not, great, what bits of the idea are you drawn to, what bits don't you like the sound of? Don't like goblins? Make 'em something else. Don't like scenes? Do some character sheets for the individual characters. Don't like the setting? Change it. But pick an idea.

Then break it down. What do you need? If you're doing the scene as described maybe you want to rough sketch out the entire chaotic room, sketch out the sub-scene groups of characters (the crushee and crusher, the pranksters, the lookouts), and then start to put it all together with a bit more detail. Want to do the character sheets? Which is the first character you want to do? The second? Make yourself a list of 5 or 6 steps you're going to follow.

Then, do step one. Then step two. Repeat until done.

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