A compilation of stuff I know about drawing Asian faces and Asian culture! I feel like many “How-To-Draw” tutorials often default to European faces and are not really helpful when drawing people of other races. So I thought I’d put this together in case anyone is interested! Feel free to share this guide and shoot me questions if you have any! I’m by no means an expert, I just know a few things from drawing experience and from my own cultural background.
i think an important thing to learn, especially if you start out with drawing anime, is that faces don’t necessarily have to narrow from top to bottom
i like to think of wide top, wide middle, wide bottom, and rectangle-like as the 4 main face shapes
what you should keep in mind about them:
you’re only halfway done: the jawlines, the width-length ratio, the amount of fat in the cheeks, the intensity or subtlety of the face’s curves are all important components you still have to decide on after choosing the shape itself
none of these shapes are exclusively feminine or masculine, don’t hesitate drawing them on any gender
most people in real life have some variation of the wide middle type
if you are trying to draw real people, getting the shape of their face down is the first step
i’ve seen tutorials say the shape of the face can tell a lot of the character’s personality – you don’t necessarily have to live by that rule. as long as you aren’t unrealistically drastic about their proportions, their face shape determines their inner qualities as much as it would in real life (not at all)
I can totally understand your frustration. We’re taught to draw thin bodies a lot more often and thoroughly than we’re taught to draw fat ones, so learning how to draw larger bodies can definitely be a struggle, even for fat artists. But I’ve rustled up some links that should hopefully prove useful to you and other artists dealing with the same problem.
Fat Drawing Tutorial:
Here’s a pretty good one that covers different fat body variations and includes larger fat girls: “Tutorial – Curves on Girls”
Once you get past the part about abs this one’s got some really good information and reference on how to draw how fat looks realistically: “Understanding Anatomy VII“ (that whole tutorial series looks to be helpful on drawing anatomy, so I recommend checking the other parts out too)
This one doesn’t cover larger fats, but it does have some good stuff about distributions of fat on the body and variations on fatness: “Varying Your Body Types”
Here’s a short, not-terribly-thorough one (that’s got some complaints in it on unrealistic depictions of fatness in fat-fetishistic art, just fyi), but which makes good points on incorporating gravity into depictions of fatness so the fat doesn’t look like balloons: “How To Draw Fat Women”
This one’s a short tutorial (that has minor problematic language) about how to draw waists that’s inclusive of smaller fat bodies. “Female Waist Tutorial”
A short tutorial about drawing hips, inclusive of smaller fat hips. Not a lot to it, but helpful to glance over. “Female Hip Tutorial”
“Drawing Fat on the Body is a video tutorial that covers some helpful advice on how to draw fat bodies building off of prior knowledge of drawing thin bodies. Doesn’t cover different types of fat bodies/fat distribution and has some other imperfections, but a decent beginner starting point. ” (contains some mild problematic language)
“How to Draw Fat Bodies” Here’s a short post with some good general tips to keep in mind when attempting to draw fat people.
Another short, general guide on drawing fat bodies, with some good example of different fat body types. “Guide to Drawing Fat Bodies”
(One of the sadder parts of finding these was sifting through different tutorials and finding ones that were teaching how to draw really inaccurate or over-simplified fat anatomy, or included really fatphobic language or commentary in the tutorial =.=)
Here’s a Site which contains lots of pictures of different women searchable by height, age, weight, etc. that looks really helpful: “My Body Gallery.com”
A site with a lot of great full-body pictures of people organized by their height and weight (referential to the bs BMI system, but still great art reference) “Cockeyed: Height / Weight”
Other Reference:
Otherwise, if you want to search for fat reference on tumblr, I’d suggest looking through tags and blogs that often contain selfies/photos of fat people, since when you’re trying to learn how fat actually looks, nothing is more accurate reference for it than the real thing.
HOWEVER, you must be respectful in your use of these tags or blogs for reference!!!! As in DO NOT draw people straight out of any photos you find and post your work unless you get permission from the subjects you’ve drawn and/or their photographers. If you do draw random people you see in the tag, then treat your drawings as practice/study and confine whatever you make to your sketchbook for your own eyes.
But I do wholly advocate looking at all sorts of images of fat people and really paying attention to all the different ways their fat manifests itself and looks, and then practicing drawing figures inspired by what you’ve observed.
(please note that some of these tags and blogs listed below may contain nudity/nsfw content:)
(If you see your blog linked to above and would rather it not be pointed to as a place to find reference of fat bodies, just let me know and I’ll take it off right away.)
Anyways, hope this helps! And if you know of, find, or make any more tutorials, references sources, etc., please do message me with the links to be added onto this post!!! I’ll update this as I find/receive more stuff to add.
(Updated: 5/31/15 with 8 new additions to the fat drawing tutorial and fat reference photo sections)
As somebody who loves drawing chubby women but doesn’t really have the anatomical confidence to do it properly these tutorials are a life saver
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
I’ve been asking around for tutorials for this for so long! Cuz hobby artists often don’t have the time or whatever to do, like, the in-depth life study stuff so this is so helpful.
requested by ion4ever. sorry it took me so long to do this for you but hopefully I was of some help?
Notes:
I use CS6, and this was mostly done with default hard round brush at around 50% opacity or higher, 100% flow, and size pressure on. I made some random brushes for the greenery by modifying the default ones.
always use a large canvas. I go about 3000px x 3000px.
with enough practice, painting backgrounds like this will be a fairly quick affair. this one, for example, took about 30 minutes? it’s just a matter of time/experience. 🙂
So yeah, good luck doing backgrounds, and have fun!! 😀
WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT YOU ARE THE BEST ART TEACHER EVER OMFG THANK YOU
If all teachers taught their subjects the way just taught this, I would have been more interested in what they had to say and less in just doing the bare minimum to pass a test.
thets a fecking chyeld OH MY GORD
“G-oh, that’s porn.”
I fucking love this
Imma save dis sINCE IVE STARTERED TO BE ABLE TO ART YAY
HOLY CHRIST YES YES THIS IS AWESOME
I watched this with the sound off and then reconsidered and turned the sound on and I’m so glad i did.
To thank for the support for our film so far, we are posting some notes on animating originally made for our animation assistants. Breakdown is a very crucial technique of animating. It is a guideline of how every action should be acted out. It involves a thinking process of “hmm, I want my character to move in this way particularly, because of the context/situation/emotion/thought… etc”
Last but not least, breakdowns are the playground for animators. If you find these notes useful, also check out our film We Have Plenty. It’s a 2D animated film created by the students of SCAD and RISD. Please support us on Kickstarter and help usspread the word! We will be back for more notes on animation!
Tutorials in the name of our film. Please support us on Kickstarter! I really really believe in our film and our team. Super excited to see it finished!