How to Draw a Schoolgirl - Manga

Now let's draw a manga schoolgirl. This is a very popular type of character in shojo, which is the girl style of manga, although boys like it, too, because of the intense characters. Now here's a typical manga shojo schoolgirl. As you can see, she's wearing her school uniform. And as you can also see, she has lapels, a collar, a tie, buttons, and it gets a little complicated. Don't worry if it's tough for you to draw that right now. I'm going to give you some hints so that you can draw it. Take a little of the mystery out of it. Here's the basic instruction of the girl. Square shoulders, narrow waist. Notice on a female character, the waist is very high. So we start here at the middle of the neck, and we take this out diagonally to make the collar. Slight curve in, slight curve in. And since it's coming toward you, the near side is larger than the far side. See how this is narrower than this? Okay. Then we're going to do the lapels, and it's kind of like a reverse curve. It curves around, and then back the other way and meets up with this, this line here. This lapel does the same thing, except that it goes slightly under this one, doesn't meet it exactly halfway. One lapel has to go over the other. We'll widen them out, and we'll follow the contour of the main one. Follow the contour of the inner lapel, like this. Now we're going to draw a little pocket here, but we're not going to draw it straight, because the body is curved. The body has contours. So we're going to follow those contours and curve it just ever so slightly. [inaudible02:01] Then we'll add the ribbon. First a little knot here,and you could tuck it into the jacket if you want, but it's always nice if something is breezy and flowing. And it should flow in the same direction as the hair, because the wind is coming from one direction, not two at the same time. The hair is going this way, so the bow should go this way. So we'll bring it up over like this. Nice curved lines. Color that in, and there is your manga schoolgirl.