Introduction

Hello! My name is reve ^-^

 

Mini character or chibi is a form of smaller and cute stylized version of character drawing.

In this tips, I will show you how to make a chibi character from body proportion until the final colored version.

 

Let’s start with the very first step, we need to know the basic of how to draw chibi.

 

Body Proportion of Chibi Character

The very important part of drawing a chibi is its body proportion. Despite its small appaerance, chibi focused people/viewer attention on its big head and big eyes.

 

There’s 3 common body proportion to draw a chibi character.

The more bigger the body proportion, the more detailed the character will have. The more smaller the body proportion, everything will be more simplified.

 

Facial Proportion & Hair

Just like drawing a head base of any character design, we start with drawing a circle. After that, we add curve for the cheeks (little or bigger depends on your preference). Chibi’s big eyes are the main focus so we exclude drawing the nose (or we could just draw a dot).

There is no significant different between drawing hair in normal character design and chibi character design.

Hands & Feet

Because of its big head, the arms of chibi just reach the middle of the head. Smaller character, smaller fingers^^. We don’t need to take our time to focus on the detail of the fingers.

Also, we don’t need to draw the toes and a too detailed shoes!

Drawing a Chibi Character

Now that we know the basic things to draw a chibi character, lets make a chibi character based on what we have learned earlier!

 

Step1: choose the body proportion. I choose 3 heads.

Step2: draw circles and make curve using simple shapes to identify the cheeks and the body.

Step3: draw the details! Remember, not too simple and not too detailed.

Viola! We made our chibi character.

 

Now, this is how i color my chibi character design.

For the hair, i use a simple shading without using layer effects.

There's a lot of shading style of eyes that you can apply. These are just a little example:

Viola!! this is my final colored of my chibi character.

I hope you find this helpful and useful!

 

My last words; Be creative! You can change the eyes style, the hair style, the coloring style, the pose, anything that will suit your preferences. Using a reference is not really a bad thing, i use a lot of references too! i looked up at other artist's chibi character to get inspired. We could learn many things from observation.

 

Thank you for your attention and time! i really appreciate it^^