How to Draw Anime and Manga: Easy Step-by-Step Anime Tutorials
What do you think when you hear the word “anime”?
Maybe you think of Japanese cartoon characters with big eyes and colorful hair. Stories with adventure, action, and romance. Or maybe you think of your favorite anime series like Naruto, Dragon Ball, or Sailor Moon.
Are you interested in drawing anime and manga characters, but don’t know where to start?
Perhaps you have found a few different tutorials online, but none of them are quite what you’re looking for.
Easy Drawing Guides is one of the best resources for quality, original anime and manga style drawing guides.
On this page we have collected over 100 easy, step-by-step anime and manga drawing exercises, lessons, and tutorials.
You’ll find guides for drawing iconic anime features, like large eyes, intense facial expressions, outlandish hairstyles, and sometimes exaggerated body proportions.
You can start with the basics and learn to draw simple anime faces, eyes, hair, bodies, and more.
Then, when you feel you’re ready, you can proceed to draw complete anime characters.
In addition to step-by-step anime tutorials, we have a lot of reference drawings that will help you create manga characters that are different and unique.
Like any form of art, drawing anime takes practice. If you come back regularly to learn more and find cool drawing ideas, you’re guaranteed to get better at drawing anime and manga!
Would you like to get printable practice sheets for all of these drawing guides? Click here to learn more.
How to Draw an Anime Head and Face
When it comes to creating anime characters, the head and face is arguably one of the most important areas to get right.
In the following tutorials, we’ll practice how to correctly place the facial features and draw an anime face from different angles.
Examples of Anime Head and Face Drawings
Looking for more? Keep scrolling.
How to Draw Anime Facial Features
In the following tutorials, we’ll learn how to draw cute facial features (eyes, mouth, nose, eyebrows, ears) for anime characters.
To make your characters unique, we’ll also show how to add glasses and different beards and mustaches to your anime drawings.
How to Draw Anime Emotions and Facial Expressions
Anime characters often have strong emotions. Below we'll learn how to express different emotions by adjusting eyes, eyebrows, and mouth/lips.
How to Draw Anime Hair
Anime hairstyles can be very stylized and exaggerated. We’ll practice drawing different anime girl and boy hairstyles and also give a lot of different hair drawing ideas (click the guides for more hairstyle examples).
How to Draw an Anime Body
Anime characters can be of different sizes and shapes, but it’s important to draw them with the right proportions.
We’ll start by drawing body bases for an anime girl, boy, and child. Practicing with these simple bodies will make drawing action characters much easier.
Examples of Anime Full-Body Drawings
Now, we are going to draw complete full-body anime characters. You can practice everything we’ve discussed above.
Keep scrolling for more examples in the Anime Characters section.
How to Draw Anime Hands, Arms, Feet, Legs, and Muscles
You can add a lot of character to your anime drawings by learning how to draw arms, hands, legs, feet, and different muscles.
How to Draw Anime Clothes
They say “clothes make the man” but clothes can also make your anime character. Create your own custom anime outfits with the following tutorials.
How to Draw Anime Characters
Finally, you can put everything you have learned into practice by drawing a few of the following anime characters.
If you feel you need more practice, don’t hesitate to go back to the earlier anime drawing guides.
More Anime Drawing Tutorials
We also have a bunch of other anime tutorials: Pets, animals and such, which are listed here.
How to Draw Famous Anime and Manga Characters
Do you love a certain anime or manga character? We have drawing tutorials for a lot of them! Which one would you like to draw first?