Quick Art Tip - Child Proportions

Quick art tip - child proportions

Ok this is a real quick one but let me show you how to get more-or-less accurate sizes for child characters. Kids are tricky to draw, they are - from toddler up to about teens people change radically almost every year so pinpointing character’s size during those years is pure hell.

What you need to do to make everything super easy for yourself is to check their Head Proportion. What makes kids look like - well, kids, is that their heads are proportionally large in comparison to their body.

Average adult is about 7,5 heads tall in comparison to their own body, however with children under 10 that number is just under 6 heads with about 1 head shorter the younger you go down to 3 heads as an infant.

Easiest way to figure the so-so head-height of a certain age is to find images of said age group and do a quick count on them

at which after you can replicate it in your own works - don’t mind if it’s not 1:1 with reference, finding images that are actually of the age you need is tricky and kids in general vary a lot so someone might be a lot taller than others. You have a bout  0,5 -1 heads of wiggle room before it starts to look way older.

Proportions are super important in art and i lovingly recommend everyone to figure out basics of them - it’s the easiest way to get notifically better with art. I could go on about proportions but let’s wrap this up. Need to note however that head proportion is not same as character height - a character can be 15 feet tall but still have head-height of 6, HH is simply a way to scale out the body.

Hey jsyk it’s 2018 and if you’re still drawing characters with big lips like THIS, even if they’re pale/not black, it’s fucking racist. Stop doing it.

No excuses. “It’s a stylistic choice!” It’s a RACIST stylistic choice.

“Idk how else to draw big lips!” That’s because you relied on racist caricatures and are a bad artist. Teach yourself. Learn. If you’re not willing to do that, then you are a bad, racist artist.

“But it’s part of the character design!” Yeah, and it’s racist. If it’s your OC, then change it. If it’s not your OC, make the right choice and draw them with normal looking bigger lips instead of this racist monstrosity.

And if this post makes you uncomfortable because it’s calling you out for stuff you’ve done, good. Fix it. Own up to it. Grow.

If you see this and you’re first thought is to defend this: you are racist. You are part of the problem. Congrats. Now work on yourself and unlearn that.

Lighting Studies by  Andrew Lester

Natural Black Hair Tutorial! Usually Black hair is excluded in the hair tutorials which I have seen so I have gone through it in depth because it’s really not enough to tell someone simply, “Black hair is really curly, draw it really curly.“ 

The next part of Black Hair In Depth will feature styles and ideas for designing characters and I will release it around February. If you would like to see certain styles, please shoot me a message!

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