The Male Head
As you may have gathered, I don't much enjoy drawing male characters. But it's unavoidable if you want to do any kind of a story. I've been working on an idea for an online Manga that I'll post if I can ever get time to get it done; I designed it specifically to have as few male characters as possible (it's set in a girl's boarding school on a space station) but even so I had to do a few square jaws.
Male Manga characters are divided into three basic categories: macho men, cute boys, and villians. Macho men and villans tend to be drawn in a style similar to Western comics, maybe slightly simplified. Cute boys, or Bishonen, however, can be drawn very similar to a female character, with just slight modifications.
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| Start with the familiar layout from the female head tutorial. If the character is to be an adult, maybe just make the box a little longer than you would for a girl. |
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| Now, the variations. First, give him a chin, just a straight line at the bottom point of the face triangle. You can pretty much use the front of the box as the plane of the male chin, since they stick forward more than the female. The mouth is slightly wider, the nose a little longer, the eye sockets are smaller and the cheekbones higher. The eyes are somewhat smaller usually, though not always. The brows tend to be quite thick and angled upward at the outside. Sometimes this is the only thing that clearly distinguishes a male face from a female. You don't know how long I thought Innuyasha was a chick. |
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| There he is, the troubled loner that, somehow, has lots of friends and gets invited to all the parties, though he refuses to have fun at them, which, for some reason, makes the Bishoujo swoon... Younger male characters will tend to have wild and crazy hair (like Van wassisname), while older ones have a standard Salaryman do. I guess this guy's stuck in the middle. Come to think of it, he looks a little like me... |
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