Plan Out Your Drawing & Draw Larger to Smaller


 Large to small shape drawing order

Estimate your proportions before  you start drawing. You can see that in the above example the girl is 6 1/2 heads tall (as anime characters tend to have larger heads in relations to their bodies then real people). By comparing the size of different parts or objects in your drawing to one another you will be less likely to make a mistake.

Regardless of what you are drawing start with the larger shapes first. You don’t need to always start with the absolute largest shape but definitely don’t start with the smaller details.

If you area drawing a person start with the head and work your way down through the rest of the body. Don’t draw the smaller details like the facial features until you have the shape of the entire body.

Drawing this way will make it a lot easier to fix mistakes. For example if you fully draw out the head with all of the details of the facial features you may then find that the body doesn’t actually fit on your drawing area. You will then have to start over and redraw the entire face again.

Some of these mistakes can be easier to fix if drawing digitally but that doesn’t mean that you should not learn to draw in the correct order.

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