How to Draw a Manga Body Standing Up from All Angles

A body is summarized by three rigid masses connected by two flexible areas. This is the only thing to remember.

• The head: a flattened sphere on the sides, with a jaw hanging underneath.
• The rib cage: an egg or rounded box, which never deforms.
• The pelvis: a shorts-like shape, shorter, which also never deforms.

Between the two, the spine, which bends and twists. Between the head and the thorax, the neck, which does the same thing but shorter. All body movement comes from these two flexible areas: if your character is stiff, it's because the thorax and pelvis have remained parallel.

The tilt that gives life

When a character leans on one leg, the hip on that side rises and the shoulder on the same side drops. The two lines, that of the shoulders and that of the hips, cross in an X instead of being parallel. This detail transforms a mannequin pose into a living character pose, and it costs nothing: two lines inclined in opposite directions from the sketch.

The limbs

Arms and legs are built from two cylinders each, separated by a joint sphere. The detail that betrays beginners: the elbow is placed at waist level, no higher, and the hand drops to the middle of the thigh when the arm is relaxed. Many characters have too short arms because the artist stops them at the hip.

Measurements are taken in head heights. A teenage or young adult manga character is generally 7 to 7.5 heads tall, a child 5 to 6, a heroic character 8. On a 7-head figure:

• the crotch falls exactly halfway down the total height;
• the knees are halfway between the crotch and the ground;
• the navel is slightly above the middle of the torso;
• the foot measures about one head height, which always seems too large at first.

Between a male and a female character, it's not the lengths that change, but the widths and transitions. The former has shoulders wider than the hips and angular connections; the latter has shoulders and hips of similar width, a more pronounced waist, and continuous curved connections. You can draw the exact same skeleton and only change these two parameters.

Foreshortening, or why an arm extended towards the reader is problematic

When a limb points towards the reader, it shortens drastically and its extremity enlarges. This is exactly what the brain refuses to draw, because it knows the true length of the arm. The workaround is mechanical: draw the limb as a series of stacked cylinders and flatten the cylinders close to the body. Marking the ellipses at the ends of each cylinder is enough to make the foreshortening believable.

Four checks that take two minutes and prevent you from losing a board.

• The mirror test. Flip your drawing horizontally, on screen or by transparency in front of a window. Proportional distortions immediately jump out at you, because your brain no longer recognizes the image it has created.
• The balance line. Draw a vertical line from the base of the neck to the ground. It should fall within the support area, between the feet or on the supporting foot. If it falls outside, your character is falling.
• Joint symmetry. Elbows at the same relative height, knees at the same relative height, unless the pose requires it.
• The silhouette test. Fill in the shape with black: the pose must remain legible. A pose where the arms merge with the torso will tell the reader nothing.

What to repeat to progress quickly

Quick sketching, or gesture drawing, remains the most effective exercise: thirty seconds per pose, from photos of people in motion, without trying to finish. The goal is not to produce a pretty drawing, but to capture the line of action and the tilt of the pelvis in a few strokes. Twenty thirty-second sketches per day will lead to more progress than one finished drawing per week.

Once the body is stabilized, the two points that then block are almost always the hands and hair, which are worked on separately.