Welcome back, Mangakas! Today on How to Draw Manga in 3D our drawing tutorial is on Mogami Kyoko from Skip Beat. Mogami’s story is a well known tale of love betrayed and the desire for revenge, something a lot of us with ex’s can relate to. Her devotion to Sho is ruined when she finds out that he’s only keeping her around to cook, clean and work for him while he pursues his singing career. This revelation sends her over the edge and she dumps him and joins his rival singing agency to get her revenge. Today we’re going to be drawing the manga version of Kyoko instead of the anime one. It’s a lot more detailed, but, in my opinion, a lot better looking ^_^.
This tutorial can be really time-consuming and the detailing in her eyes and hair can be challenging, so we should definitely count on it being tough and not the best tutorial to start with if you’re a beginner. If you’re interested in drawing other Skip Beat characters, just click on the Skip Beat tag in the tag cloud on the right for all of our Skip Beat drawing tutorials. Let’s get our materials ready and begin our Kyoko tutorial.
A quick note about materials for this tutorial. You might want to have two pencils or two finishing pens for this tutorial as the detail inside her eyes and in her hair needs very small or very thin lines. So you might want to get a thinner pen or pencil for the detailing than your usual one. Another trick is to make your Kyoko drawing larger than usual. That way everything will be bigger and it’ll be easier to draw in the details. Let’s learn how to draw Kyoko!
Step 1
Step 01: As all of our returning mangakas will already know all of the blue lines you see in this tutorial are only construction lines and we’ll be erasing them later on. So, it’s important not to press too hard on your pencil when drawing these lines. You’ll see our final lines in black towards the end of the tutorial. Let’s begin with our head circle, eye and center lines.
We’ll draw a fairly large circle for the head to begin. As it can be hard to draw a good circle free hand, try lightly going around a few times with your pencil and then draw your head circle on top of your outline. Now, as you can see the eye and center lines are not straight. This is because Kyoko’s head is tilted forward and to the side slightly. The center line curves at the top and extends down below the head circle, it’s pretty far to the left. The eye line is quite low and you’ll notice that it curves down slightly to meet the center line before cutting back up just after it passes through the center line. That’s definitely what we’re going for.
Step 2
Step 02: Time to add some features. Let’s begin with Kyoko’s jaw. We’ll draw a line starting on the right where the eye line meets the head circle and stops at the bottom of the center line. Then from the bottom of the center we’ll draw a more curvy line up to the point where the eye line meets the head circle on the left. Once we’ve got the jaw, let’s add the ear by drawing a “C” shape on the right again starting from where the eye line meets the head circle. We can’t see her ear on the left because it is hidden behind her hair and face.
Next, we’ll draw Kyoko’s eyes. They are a little irregularly shaped and their position is really important too, because of the way her head is tilted. The eyes are leaf like shapes but the side closest to the center line is cut off with a vertical line instead of a tip. The eye on the left fills almost the whole side to the left of the center line and the bottom of the eye just brushes the bottom of the head circle. The eye on the right is about half way between the center line and the edge of the head circle on the right. Before moving on, let’s draw the small hook shape for her nose just on the center line where it meets the head circle.
Step 3
Step 03: Ok, everyone, let’s add the neck, the major hair shape outline and the eyebrows. We’ll start with Kyoko’s neck which is long and slender. We’ll draw two lines which curve outward at the bottom. On the right start, again, from where the eye line touches the head circle, while on the left we’ll start just to the left of the center line from the bottom of the jaw. Next, we’ll draw the two major hair shapes. Starting from the top of the head where the center line touches, draw the hair shape on he left — it’s an “S” shape that curves back in to touch the neck just below the chin. On the right, the hair shape starts at the top and curves all the way around the head in a long soft “S” shape. The line should come to a point and then curve back in to touch the bottom of Kyoko’s neck on the right. Lastly, we’ll draw the eyebrows which are long diagonals over the eyes. Notice that the eyebrow on the left touches the top of the eye while the eyebrow on the right is above the eye.
Step 4
Step 04: Let’s zoom in on the face to do some work on Kyoko’s features. You’ll notice right away now that we’ve zoomed in that everything on the right side of her face will appear larger than on the left, this is due to the turn and tilt of her head and is a great example of our size and squashing 3D principles. Let’s begin by drawing the “U” shape inside each eye to outline her iris. Then we can add the line above the eye on the right, between the eye and the eyebrow, for her upper eye lid. Then, a shorter line over the eye on the left for her other lid. Moving down, we can draw the very small “>” shape for her mouth on the center line below the head circle and also the dimple line just beneath her mouth. To finish up this step, let’s draw her inner ear. Inside her ear we’ll draw an incomplete leaf shape and then add two “c” lines to connect the two sides of the “leaf”. In the end, it should look a little bit like a sugar beet ^_^.
Step 5
Step 05: Great job so far everyone. Now, it’s time to zoom out again and start working on Kyoko’s hair. It might be a good idea to use your eraser and lighten the construction lines we’ve made so far. After that, let’s start with the major hair piece on the left. We need to add lines inside the hair shape to start breaking up the solid shape into smaller and smaller individual hair pieces and spikes. I’ve drawn seven lines inside the hair shape on the left to begin, and a longer eighth line at the bottom of the hair on the left that extends to down to the neck. Next, go back up to the top of the head circle on the left and we’ll add some more lines and two long hair spikes across the top of her head. You’ll notice that Kyoko’s hair doesn’t cover her eyes but stops right at them, be sure to do the same. Lastly, on the right, starting at about the ear, draw four lines inside the major hair piece at the bottom to divide up her hair. And, finally, there’s a last long hair spike on the right starting at the bottom of her ear and extending down to the base of her neck. Got it? Excellent, let’s move on.
Step 6
Step 06: More and more and more hair in this step, mangakas. It’s impossible to describe all the lines to be added, so here are some general points to help you get it right. We should use the lines we drew in the previous step as a guide and draw lots of lines between them to suggest more hair pieces and layers. The ends of the hair on the left and the right, which at the beginning of this step should be flat, should actually end in small spikes. The ends of her hair across her face should also end in many, short and thin spikes. Give it a shot and see how you do. We haven’t started our final lines yet, so there’s always a chance to correct later on with our pen what we don’t get exactly right here ^_^.
Step 7
Step 07: Whew, that was a tough step. In this one, we’re going to zoom back in again on the eyes and do a lot of detailing work to her inner eyes. As I mentioned at the beginning of the tutorial, it might be a good idea to use either a sharper pencil or one with thinner lead to get all the details. If you’re using a drawing program, bump up the resolution. Let’s begin by dividing the iris shape we drew in step 03 into two with a slightly curving line in each eye. Then, in the eye on the left we’ll draw three small circles of different sizes. These will be reflection spots inside her pupils. Do the same for the eye on the right with the circles slightly larger than those in the eye on the left (size 3D principle). Then, beneath that but still inside the iris, we’ll add the small dash marks to each eye for the filaments of the iris — there are more dashes in the eye on the right than on the left. Next, we’ll draw the dashes on the outside of her eyes for her eyelashes. Again, the dashes on the left should be smaller than those on the right and on the right the eyelashes on the upper part of the eye are in each corner. Before we move on, let’s add the crescent shape to the bottom of Kyoko’s nose. And, lastly, the small fish hook line for the mark on her cheek on the right.
Step 8
Step 08: Let’s stick with the zoom and take the opportunity to do our final lines on the eyes with all their details. Once more, using a finishing pen with a thinner tip might be a good idea to work with all the small dashes and filling. Let’s start with the pupils. We’ll fill in the areas around the small circles we drew in the previous steps, leaving the circles empty. With the eye on the right, we should have some small dashes coming off the bottom of the pupil for the beginning of the iris filaments. We’ll also thicken the line that makes up the bottom of the iris and trace the small dashes there too. In the eye on the left we see the lower but not the upper filament dashes. For the actual eye shape itself, we’ll trace only the bottom and the top leaving the sides untraced. Then, we can thicken these lines slightly to add some depth to the image. We’ll also trace the eye lashes and the long eyebrows. And, before moving on, let’s trace out our final lines for Kyoko’s nose, mouth and mouth dimple, and be sure to fill in the crescent shape for the bottom of her nose.
Step 9
Step 09: After the ink dries for her eyes, you can use your eraser to lighten all of the other construction lines we’ve made so far. Then using our finishing pen, we’ll trace our final lines, including for the hair. It might be best to use your thinner pen for the hair, as we’ll be adding some further details in the next step. As you trace, be sure not to trace anything that should be hidden, for example, the top of her ear, any of the lines beneath her hair that we used to draw her head or any of the major hair lines we don’t want.
Step 10
Step 10: Now that we’ve got our final lines traced, let’s go back to the hair and using a very thin pen we’ll add some more lines to each of the hair pieces and spikes we’ve already drawn, especially in the front (her bangs), and the bottom of her hair on the left and right. We can do this by adding lines that split the hair spikes into smaller and smaller spikes. See our How to Draw Manga Hair mini-tutorial for more guidance on how to do this.
Step 11
Step 11: Once you’ve got her hair to your satisfaction, just use your eraser to erase any remaining construction lines you can see and stand back to take a look at Kyoko from Skip Beat! If your goal is to become a great mangaka make sure to draw Kyoko again from memory. Then compare the final drawing with the original and correct any mistakes you might have made. Try once again from memory. This is the best way to build a huge library of shapes and get the tracing experience necessary that you can use in the future for your own manga characters.
Draw with passion! -_^
Hiroshi
1 comment
The eyes are beautiful.
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