Learn how to draw people: Mistakes to learn from

October 29, 2009 by r2moo2
Filed under: Doodle Art, How to draw manga tutorials

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As promised, I will be showing some of my foul ups and mistakes of my manga drawing training with my manga teacher.

You can laugh all you want, but this is for learning purposes, so I guess it is worth it for readers online.

Anyway, if any reader wants to begin learning how to draw people for manga comics or webcomics, please start with the “Drawing outline of human body” series, because in the series we discuss about the fundamentals of drawing manga males and females, or rather manga girls and guys.

However in this post we will touch on how to make drawings of human body look more life-like, like people.

Learn how to draw people: Mistakes to learn from

*Click on the picture to enlarge.

This is one of the major mistakes I made in drawing outlines of male anatomy. As this was focusing on anatomy, I didn’t spend much time on making the characters look great on their facial features, so pardon the ugly facial features.

So what is the most prominent mistake I made in the above doodle art? It was in both male characters’ poses.

Look at the legs at the above two male manga characters; they are two closed apart! No guy at any street would walk or pose with their legs so close to each other like a female’s.

After I drew the whole character, I was totally disguested with it, especially the right male character. It looked so sissy. However it was a learning point and I decided to still keep this mistake on paper..

Mistake to learn from #1: Never draw male characters with their legs closed together, unless we are trying to draw a sissy.

Tip #1: To avoid the above mistake, my manga teacher advised me to observe how real people walk naturally. By making pointers of how they walk, the mannerisms and the poses, it will help in my drawing skills in drawing people.

If any reader read “Drawing outline of human body part 4: Adding muscles and flesh to stick figures“, you will understand that I did not draw the above male characters at one attempt.

Rather I did it in multiple stages: from drawing stick figures, to adding flesh and muscles to the stick figures, and lastly to add details to the outline of human body.

The above exercise helped to identify where did my mistake occur, which I am going to show it here:

*Click to enlarge

As we can see above, even before I added details to my male characters, the outline of the human body already suggested that my poses are really for females and not for males.

Therefore, it goes to show that my advanced stick figure drawings were not mastered well. If it was done well, the mistake would not be made.

Tip #2: Seek to master advanced stick drawings and their poses well. As I have mentioned before, my friend who graduated with an arts degree, stated that they spent 1 whole year drawing stick figures as foundation.

Therefore stick figure drawings are not just for children to play with; it is used for artists to practise drawing human anatomy.

Other tips and advices

The above tips are not just for walking and standing poses; even for sitting and kneeling poses, generally real guys do not really close up their legs, for natural reasons.

*Click to enlarge

The above pose isn’t really so bad, but my manga teacher commented that generally japanese guys do not kneel that way; rather their legs are still apart while kneeling.

Hence it is vital to notice the mannerisms and poses that real people make, in order to learn how to draw people. Otherwise our artwork will lack realism.

Final words for this post

The mistakes that I made in the above doodle art are not exhaustive; I only picked out the major flaws in these doodles.

If any reader wishes to learn how to draw people well, please go to the “How to draw manga tutorials” page and look out for the series on “Drawing outline of human body”. It will be good to start from there.

Anyway that’s it for this post. Stay tuned for more updates!

If anyone wants to share his experience of drawing manga, or comics, or webcomics, just share it in the comments section(highly recommended for everyone to see) or the “Contact me” form. Any participation is greatly appreciated!

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