Tips for Drawing Manga Characters at Different Ages!

Hello , if you want .

In this week's video , I'm going to be giving some tips for drawing characters at different ages ranging from child to adult .

I remember always having a really hard time drawing characters that were different ages .

All of the characters I drew looked like they were in their mid teens .

And when I would try to draw kids , they would kind of just look like small teenagers .

So yeah , drawing characters at different ages can be kind of tricky , especially if you don't know what to change .

So let's take a look at what changes as a character gets older .

We'll start with female characters and then we'll move on to male characters .

Also , the human body can be many different shapes and proportions .

I only be discussing one body type for each gender .

So let's start by taking a look at what changes take place in the female face that rhymes .

Also , the child's head should be much smaller than the adult's head .

But to help us notice the differences , I made the child's head almost the same size as the adult's head .

One of the things that changes a lot is the jawline .

So the child's jawline is overall rounder and shorter .

While the adult's jawline is longer and more angular .

The teenager is somewhere in the middle , more angular than the child , but not as long as the adults .

Another thing that really changes is eye placement .

When a character is younger , the eyes are lower on the head .

So for the child's eyes , they are very low on the head and pretty large , they are below the halfway point of the head .

With the teenager , the eyes move up some , but they don't really change in shape .

At least when it comes to the style of face , the eyes move closer to the halfway point for the adult eyes move even higher on the face .

They are now really close to the halfway point and they also get more narrow , they are now wider than they are tall .

So basically the older the character gets , the higher up the eyes move , however , they don't go past the halfway point of the head .

So , you know , an old person won't have their eyes on their forehead .

Some other details I want to point out is that the ears for the child are lower on the head and rounder for the adult and the teen , they get higher up on the head and they get more angular .

I also change how I draw the nose for adult characters .

This is just a style choice .

You can keep the nose the same if you want to , I like changing how I draw it because it makes the nose look more uh big and more defined .

Lastly , I make the eyelid get more prominent as the character gets older .

I don't know , I just find this helps them look a bit older .

So now that we have taken a look at how the head changes , let's take a look at how the body changes .

When I draw the body , I measure it using the length of the head .

This sometimes confuses people .

So let's go over my measuring process .

So I have a head and I want the body that I'm going to be drawing to be six heads tall .

So I take the length of the head and stack it six times .

This gives me the length for how long I want the body to be .

So this body is six heads tall .

I often use this body type for younger teens .

The crotch is at the halfway point of the body .

So basically , the body is six heads tall .

So the lower body is three heads long and the upper body is three heads long .

Little kids are the exception to the crotch goes at the halfway point rule , kids often have kind of short legs for kids .

I make the legs pretty much the same length as the torso instead of the same length as the upper body .

So let's take a look at how the body changes as it ages first .

We have the child body .

It is four heads tall .

I would use this body type for a kid that is around age six or seven .

I try to keep everything very round .

There also isn't any gender defining characteristics in the shape of the body .

Yet this body shape could work for a boy or a girl .

Next we have the body that is five heads tall .

I would use this body for a preteen character .

Ages 10 to 12 .

We start to see the hips and waist form as the character starts to turn into a teen .

When they become a teen , I draw them as six heads tall .

The chest is now more developed and the hips are more noticeable .

She is starting to get more of an hour glass shape .

Lastly , we have the adult body that is seven heads tall .

I would use this body for characters that are 18 or older .

She now has a full hour glass shape and her hips are very defined and her chest is fully developed .

I noticed while drawing all of these that none of them fitted how I drew my mid teen characters in my comic , my next door neighbors Six seem to be too small and seven seem to be too big .

I use kind of a weird measurement which is 6.5 heads tall .

It's in between the younger teen and the adult .

Basically , I just make the proportions of the seven head tall body a bit smaller .

I find it kind of funny .

I never noticed this before .

I always thought I'd do them kind of as six types tall , but it's actually a bit bigger .

Another thing I wanna point out is the neck .

As the character gets older , the neck gets wider and longer .

Now that we've taken a look at how girls change .

Let's take a look at how male characters change .

I'm not going to talk about the boy child age very much because it's pretty much just like the girl version .

Instead , I want to focus more on the preteen age .

For my girl characters , the face doesn't change very much from the preteen to the mid teen .

It's pretty much the same .

This is because my female characters already look pretty young .

However , for my male characters , the face changes a lot more from preteen to teen .

The preteen boy has a similar face proportion to my teen girls .

I do try to make the face a little more angular for the boy .

When the boy becomes a teen , the jawline gets longer , the eyes move higher up on the head and become more narrow , kind of like the adult female face .

When the teen boy becomes an adult , the eyes move even higher on the head and they get even more narrow .

The jaw also becomes even more angular like I mentioned before .

As the character gets older , the ears move higher up on the head and aren't as round , the neck also gets thicker and wider .

Ok , let's talk about how the male body changes for girls .

It was the hips and the chest that develop for males .

It's mostly the shoulders that change for the male preteen body .

I make it six heads tall .

You may notice that my male characters are one head taller compared to my female characters .

The preteen girl is five heads tall , but the preteen boy is six heads tall .

The preteen boy doesn't really have any defining characteristics yet .

However , as he becomes a team , the shoulders get broader and the waist gets more narrow , we can also see more muscle development .

I draw the team boy as seven heads tall , a head taller than my teen girls or half a head taller than what I draw my web comic girl characters .

At lastly , we have the adult male .

He is eight heads tall .

Once again , he is a head taller than the adult female .

The shoulders get even wider and the waist gets a bit more narrow .

So here's a look at all the different bodies and faces .

So those are my tips for drawing characters at different ages .

I hope these tips were a bit helpful .

Thank you all so much for watching this video and I hope you enjoyed this tutorial .

I really like making tutorials , but they often don't get as many views as my other videos .

And this can be kind of encouraging especially since my tutorials take a lot of work .

Uh , so if you could share this video , I would really appreciate it and I really appreciate you watching it till the end and taking the time to watch this video .

Anyways , I'll see you all next week in my next video .

Bye , but not as long as the adults , a teenager , I want my cold to go away .

I'm tired of coughing .

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