10 Female Manga Hairstyles

And to continue the post from yesterday.... girl's hairstyles! There's way more possibility, but I was fairly conservative with my chosen styles.

You can do practically anything! There are so many tuturials on hair out there, so go check them out. I have only a few things to add:

1: To keep a girl with a boy-cut or short hair from looking like a boy, give it more volume, and, if it's not spikey, make it a little 'fluffy' at the ends.

2: Ponytails are a great way to differentiate girl manga characters

3: ... shaved heads are difficult.... :P

                                                             HAVE FUN!

10 Male Manga hairstyles

For a creative exercise I drew 10 different manga guy hairstyles.

I just want too point out two things: The ponytail and the long hair. There are a lot of manga and anime guys with ponytails or long hair( Sephiroth from FF for example). To make these characters more masculine and keep them not looking too girly, there are two things you can do:

1: Make their face structure angular; longer jawlines, flat chins. You can also make their neck a little thicker.
2: Make their ponytail/hair thin, and not so much volume on the top.

My Manga Sketches

Here are some incomplete sketches I've been working on this past week and a little bit earlier for some.  I've been a little busy for posting, but I've been able to draw some manga! :D

 The first and last are still in progress... But these are a few of the things I've been doing lately, random sketches when I'm bored, so that I can open my imagination. <--- and all this when what I really should be doing is finishing my nanowrimo novel so I can use my code... lol.

The difference between a Ballon and a Balloon

The difference between a 'Ballon' and a 'Balloon' is that a balloon has double the Os, double the effort. Make sure all your art is 'Balloon art' not 'Ballon' art.
I don't know how this really applies.... I don't know, I've just been attached to balloons and memes recently...

I challenge you to draw several pictures with a certain object, or a few that match a meme that you relate to. If you want, you can send your finished projects to me at Rachaelltroy@gmail.com so I can post some of your artwork here on my blog. :)

Fashion: You are who you wear

I've gotten quite a few offers, including a gaming company asking me to do concept art for their next game (Which I declined), but the most reoccurring reference to me is to become a fashion designer, and I agree. I love drawing people, but more then half of it's gotta be the clothes.

People don't get to see your inside feelings. People only see what you show, and that's the same for art and the art 'reader.'
If you saw someone wearing shredded jeans, a grease-stained tank top and a huge, moth eaten coat, you wouldn't think they were the owner of a million-dollar establishment.

You wouldn't think this girl lived in Antarctica. You can tell season, personality, and surroundings just from what the characters wear.


For this reason, it's extremely important to focus on what your character is wearing.

It's always a great exercise to draw a few simplistic models and do a few loose sketches of some outfits in your mind and decide what you like best like what I did here.

When you're trying to design your manga characters it may take awhile. Part of the process is too draw them several times, switching out clothes and minor features until you get a face- and an outfit- that fits them.













My favorite manga outfits to design are the kind you'd take to prom- glamorous dresses that everything in my wallet couldn't buy. Not that there is much in there, but still.
Here are a few of my favorites I keep revising.

These are for three separate dances in my manga 'The Academy.' The best places to go for fashion inspiration are prom magazines, clothes magazines, and sites  like pinterest, loaded with reference pictures and information. Always remember too take your characters appearance into account! First appearances matter, whether you're creating a manga or just drawing a character in your head.

Now taking a Realism Course!

I love manga and anime styled art, but I feel that the best way to improve it is to study the human figure itself, so I'm going to be taking a drawing portraits from picture, using books from Lee Hammond's series. Here is a picture I did of two of my little cousins. 

This was my first attempt at drawing a ( semi) realistic human from a photo. After I finish the course I'm going to do a portrait drawing and stick it in here to show you my progress. :)

Anime Chibi furries

Chibis are fun to draw, but it's even funner when you have variety. How would it be if everyone drew the same gender, same outfit, some pose every single time? You get my point.
Another way to add something different, besides clothes, gender, pose, race and grouping, is making them furries. Chibi furries can be really cute, and in my opinion, cats are the cutest.

Here I drew a few( with limited colors) and then had two at the bottom of both genders in the bare 'skeletal' form. just like chibi girls' heads are bigger, so are their ears and tails... generally.

 Here are a few more. My staple furry to draw is the snow leopard, quickly seconded by the Jaguar and the wolf. So have some fun with your chibis and shake things up by making them furries. Maybe try some of the poses in my Chibi Couples post here.

Anime Chibi couple poses

Chibi poses! They make easy blog posts! lol. Chibis are easy to draw alone, or just standing, But put two or even three of them together and it can be a mess.
Here's a sheet I drew of some of my favorite couple poses, just reverting some older drawings into chibi couples instead of manga ones. Chibis just add to the cuteness.

Oh and there's forever-alone-with-pizza in the corner. But he has food, and a dog, which could be seen as the better option in some situations. One of the most difficult things when drawing Chibis together is their heads. They are HUGE. So try to keep things in proportion. at the same time, it's immensely helpful to have the guy chibis bigger than the girls.

So now that I've given you these poses, I hope they inspire you to draw some of your own. :)

Cute Manga Couples

Probably the biggest 'thing' in manga is the romance manga, and I like, like any other Manga Artists, too draw the cute couple or two. Maybe three. My friends will definitely call me out on that statement... oh well. :P

Here's a picture I did for one of the manga's I was working on a while back. For a lot of manga the star couple either both like each other but don't know it, or hate the other and then find out they were wrong as too the other persons character etc.

It can be difficult to draw too people, especially when they aren't just standing side by side, but interacting. Here's one I did January of last year.

And it's rough. drawing hands, let alone two hands together is a pain in the pointer finger. I suggest to reference another artist's work or a photo to get this correct. To get ideas for poses, I'll search up on pinterest for 'manga couple poses,' or 'cute anime couples.'
You can search Google, but it will bring up much more irrelevant and 'dirtier' content.
Here are a few manga couple drawings that some of you might've already seen, but they were just as good as the first time you saw them, so:

Manga Studios: The Blending tool

I'm still figuring Manga Studios out, but one of the things that really helped me take a big step was finding the blender tool.
Manga Studios is pretty good as a basic digital art program, but I wouldn't recommend it for beginners. I got it with hardly any Photoshop experience and had only doodled in painter X a few times.
For a long time I did not use the blender tool because I didn't think there was one; I'd searched, and couldn't find it, and didn't until I plundered google day and night.
Here is the mysterious little bugger:

It's that little circle of color right above the zoom tool. Now, it may seem obvious, but if you click the any of the little black triangle below the tool icons, then several optional tools will pop up like this:





 And it might start out as the dodge tool( also a priceless tool) until you switch it out. I generally keep my blender hardness as 50 or lower, and opacity at 70 or higher.

 At first I just splash on my colors in blobs with the marker tool, not really paying attention to the boundaries of the lines.

Then I take my blender tool and though I can do it with speed, I'm careful to blend the tones with a stroke that will make the art look more 3D than flat. don't change direction all of the sound either, it'll make your colors messy.
After I use my blending tool I take the eraser and erase everything that crosses the line. I will probably add a third color, or mess with it a bit more, but this is basically what I leave it at. I then make a new layer and continue on.
#Mangastudios

Whimsical Pictures

I became a little concerned about my art. I realized: I didn't have back grounds for 80% of my drawings. That would mean that by the time I wanted back grounds, I wouldn't be able to pull it off with the skill I wanted.

So, I quickly drew this. When I draw things like this, it reminds me that Manga really does just mean 'whimsical pictures.'

'Don't slip' -Jan 6, 2016

Little people can be so fun to draw. I like plants, and though it's been several years, that, and landscapes, were the only things I drew. Here's a little fairy washing her hands, a quick sketch to practice settings, like the one above.

Setting gives an extra layer of depth to your anime art, and yes, sometimes it takes a long time.

Manga Eyes

There are a LOT of different manga styles out there, and probably 2 times more different ways to draw manga eyes.

Here I did a little exercise with tombow markers, just drawing 20 different eye sets.

Here (Left to right)the first three I would use interchangeably between genders, the forth only for guys, and the last two only for girls. Manga eyes have a reputation for being shiny, but that doesn't mean you have to put a billion highlights in them. I've found that it's best for me to just keep it to a minimum of one or two.
My favorite POV to draw is 3/4.
To get a look at all the different kinds of manga eyes, I suggest watching Mark Crilley's '100 eyes' video on youtube, and I'll put the link here( When I have the time to look it up. :P).

Sketch to Finish: My Manga Art Process

So, when I was younger I used to think that artists had one try to make their art beautiful, and if it wasn't, it wasn't. That is a complete and utter LIE. I admit, sometimes I feel great and the art spills out into the page fully formed and gorgeous, but 99% of the time, it does not. Most of the time I start with a sketch of my manga art and then trace it onto another paper, and go into a little more detail and clean up with a pen and eraser. Here are a few start to finish projects I've done recently.

Here I wanted to capture the innocence of this little girl standing before an on stretching graveyard. I wanted the reader to be touched, and though it's cliche, it's real. I traced it onto another paper and inked it with my technical drawing pens.

Here I sketched out a young school girl, and though at first I added a pencil and her book, in the inked version I took them out because they clutter the picture too much and her hands were wacko and I couldn't figure out how to get them un-wacko. It ended up as a much smoother composition.

This is a manga character that's been stewing in my mind a long time. I call her Jairshon. The first was drawn roughly around midnight and I was tired, but I really wanted to get the I idea down. I scanned it in and added it into Manga studios 4ex. here, I made the necessary changes to my manga character, and discovered the filters in manga studios, which helped Jairshon look more real.

So no, sometimes it takes several tries to get our manga or anime art right, but something that you should keep in mind is that it doesn't need to be 'right,' just right enough.

Expression: greif

Someone very important in my life has now passed away. Though I miss them, I will see them again.

A lot of my art is inspired by the human experience, and I want to illustrate the things I've felt. Putting it on paper helps.

 These I did to capture a subtle sadness, one without tears. The first is naive, the second down-to-earth. Gray's and purples and blues are great for portraying grief, mystery, cold, and regret.
I hope God is helping you today with your struggles.

My first digital art project of 2016!

This is a manga studios project I started today; my first for 2016. :)
I just started and hope to finish it while the rest of my family watches LOTRs tonight.

I've never bought into the 'Wipe your slate clean' thing or that 'It's a brand new year.' It's not. This isn't a new book, it's a sequel, the prequel we just finished writing. Whatever you do this year only builds upon what you did last year. So from the foundations you've laid last year, what are you going to build, a measly shack or a magnificent castle? Happy new year. Make this one unforgettable.
-Do what you love
-Love your family
-Take chances

HAPPY NEW YEAR!