Introduction:

Hello! My name is Carolina Rivera, Hybrid creatures are everywhere, in mythology, in cartoons, animations. How do we come up to create one that have all the characteristics and mostly... in our own style?.

In this tutorial you will learn to create the concept of your Hybrid Animal Human creation using Clip Studio.

Search for references:

First at all, before creating any drawing you need to have certain image references in hand, for example:

 

1.- A Human version in your own style of the animal character you want to make.

This could be a photo reference of a model or a picture of your own human version in your own style. This would help you to grasp the human part of emotions, clothes, and the artstyle when it get mixed with your selected animal.

 

2.- Photo references and also anatomy references of the animal of your selection.

I'll be working this tutorial with 3 animals so you can get a good understanding of the basics of combining both elements and creating a new character!.

 

 

Subview and New Canvas windows for references

First, lets start by selecting all the images we want to use as a reference and add them to the Sub view in Clip studio. Click window, select Sub view and Import folder with your references images. Since we need two references at the same time, we will open the option windows, new Canvas, and this will open a window where we can see the canvas opened and it will help us to add another image reference.

We start looking at the references, you see here in my example I drawed A cute girl in my own style, and a handsome guy. Both have unique expresions and characteristics. Let's start combining both. Let's start with the girl.

Mixing The Human to Animal characteristics:

As the first image shows, we have a Bald Eagle. Eagles have this expressions that make them look scary and strong. But we need to mix both styles, In the Industry usually artists Create personalities based on the expressions of animals, but things have changed and we can make a cute animal scary or make a scary animal into a cute animal.

 

So lets start by drawing the eagle using geometry just has stated in the human form. Certain animals share with the humans this geometry, but we have to stretch it or change the size to adapt. Depends on your vision.

 

 

To have a better understanding of Anatomy if you are starting, is good to learn geometry and the best position that adapts to the body you are drawing. For example, making a animal more human.

Let's start by drawing a oval for the eagle face, next the neck by thinking ot a trapecium. and the Peck using arcs or curves, if your hand is not customized to create curves you can use the curve tool in Clip Studio.

 

Next, to add the "human parts" to your animal. The eyes of the eagle are scary but the human not, let see this example: I use the Manga Eye style but filled with the realistic eagle eye. and It gets really cute and expressive!. You can also try other styles, like drawing only points or another kind of eye, I don´t think this should need eyebrows but As I stated before, this depends of your drawing style.

 

Next to make the feathers more femenine, and curvy like the hair of my character.

 

There´s many ways to color and you can also mix any palette you want to make your character mysterious or also, use the reference window to choose the same colors.

You can also decide if the character is 70% animal or 70% human, so your hybrid looks more animal or more human.

Using the same technique as drawing a human body, but making changes to make it look more “Animal”

Mixing Animal to human characteristics

My next character is a horse, I will use The male character for this one.

We change the image in the Sub view reference window by clicking the arrows.

Next one is a horse and a good way to shape your character thinking in your animal of selection is by making the basic first shape first. And for example drawing the eyes.

We repeat the same process that we used for drawing the eagle eyes, As you can see, I drawed many eyes, so you can see how the horse personality changes based on the drawing of the "human expressions" on it. And here I did a fusion with the Male character I had for reference with the horse.

 

How do we do if we want to make this different?, for example, a more human face but a animal body?

 

Remember using Geometry to use as a base for both human and animal anatomy. This will help you to draw better the body of the animal. But you need to look at your references images always. It's a must. Before I learned to draw horses I drawed lots of horses when I was a kid, so the animal anatomy just as in human is mostly drawing references, learning their anatomy, and practice!

 

 

Adapting emotions or expressions based on our human reference,

Let's make a centaur.

I'm starting with the guy, drawing his expression, starting to make changes like erasing human ears and put horse ears. Bare male body connected to the horse body. And start by looking at the reference to add the same clothes, but mixing in how it will look in the horse. The tail should have same style as his hair. You can also add as many accesories you want and can look for photo references on how people dress their horses and make a mix. But I recommend you to create your human version and have animal reference to make a better mix of your character.

The Horse in the geometry use lots of circles since it’s a animal that have many muscles.

Making cute hybrid characters using the same technique

And last we have the cat. This example will be more for cute character. What makes a cat a cute animal and their connection is highly on the face shape, that have similarities with the human face.

Cute characters use as sketch drawing, circles, triangles, rectangles and other basic shapes that will help you to make your mascot quickly.I´m using here the same girl reference as before.

but mixing with a cat face.

If you don't like detailed characters you can make it more and more cuter by adding just lines and points. Also you can add accesories like flowers, stars, triangles in their clothes or eyes to make it extremely cute and eye catching.

 

 

Animals such as cats, have similar geometry and shape characteristics like human.

Cute characters are usually very round shaped. Or use a geometry basic shape such as circle or triangle, to make a cute mascot character.

Final Thoughts

Drawing Animals for the first time is difficult, so one of the most important aspect of this tutorial is that you practice by using geometry to learn to shape your animals. You can practice a lot so you get mastered on it, and also is recommended to learn animal anatomy to understand better what elements to connect with each part of the body. By saying this, I hope you have a good time learning from my tutorial and I hope you can do great drawings! Best wishes!