Tips

Draw Expressive Chibi Animals

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Chokiliciousness

Today, we will be learning how to make characters express themselves! :)

1: The Cuteness Cheat

There is a commonly used face hack to make Chibi/SD drawings look cute! It’s called the “Moe Triangle”! This makes expressions cute even if the character is sad, angry or expressing negative emotions. If you apply it to your chibis, the cuteness will intensify whether they are crying or happy!

Examples:

As you can see, by positioning the Eyes and the Nose/Mouth using the Moe Triangle, the image will somehow become really cute!

Below are some that don’t use the triangle:

The images are still cute, however, for some reason our brains think that the images using the triangle are much cuter compared to the ones that aren’t using them.

IMPORTANT: Not all that use the triangle will become cute, and not all that don’t use it are not cute!

Like below:

In summary, the Triangle is mostly used to enhance already cute faces and is not the only solution to cuteness!

2: Expressions of the Characters

We can tell how the character feels mostly when we look at their faces! We can see it in their eyes, their mouth, their eyebrows, and even in their body! By drawing each of them differently, we can convey different emotions!

Eyes & Mouth

By drawing the eyes and mouth differently, we can create a range of varying emotions:

Even if there is only a slight change in the mouth like in the “Happy” and “Sad” Emotions we could already tell that it’s a different emotion from each other.

Level of Emotion

Most emotions have various levels in feelings, you can tell how much of the Emotion they feel! We can also use it in our illustrations so the audience can tell how regular or how extreme they feel!

As you can see, the emotions on the Left most feel less than the emotions on the Right!

The Impact of Eyebrows

Another way to express emotions are the eyebrows. If your illustration’s eyes and mouth are in a style that’s hand to tell what they are feeling. Eyebrows will help you!

Even if I draw the Eyes as Dots, and leave the mouth the same we could still tell what they are feeling!

3: Animal Forms

Chibi animals have been simplified to the extent that sometimes we can’t tell what kind of animal it is! The Solution to this problem is to make sure certain features stand out!

Ears, Tails, Noses, Mouths, Body Types and even colors can make difference!

By changing these features, it can help people tell what kind of animal they are 80% of the time!