How to Draw a Realistic Anime Face Step by Step

Draw a Realistic Anime Face – This step-by-step tutorial shows you how to draw female anime that looks very different from the usual anime styles.

Drawing an anime face that looks realistic is a little more challenging than drawing a “normal” or manga anime-style face. While the painting process itself is not very difficult, balancing realistic facial features and maintaining an anime look is the challenge.

To help with that challenge, this tutorial provides intricate details of the drawing process. Includes a description of how to paint the head and each facial feature to achieve a more “realistic” look.

Be sure to make clear lines for the first stages of the drawing so you can easily erase the parts later. The lines in the examples are easily black to see them. You can pass your drawing with black lines after you are sure everything is in the right place and after deleting all the guidelines and facial parts hidden by the hair.

Step 1 – Drawing A Semi-Realistic Anime Theme

Anime characters usually have round faces. The lower part of the anime’s face is usually drawn with two lines, one running from the top of the head to the area around the mouth and the other from there to the chin. The chin itself is usually drawn sharply or with a slight curve.

To get a realistic look of an anime, draw the head in almost the same way but with a flat and wide chin (close to the real chin). You can also choose to make the head a little “longer” (longer straight up).

Start the drawing with a straight line to help you make sure both sides of the face are the same size. Next, you can draw a circular shape on the top of the head and highlight the lines of the lower part of the head as described.

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Step 2 – Eye Painting

Take a look at how you can come up with traditional anime characters (as suggested in other tutorials here on AnimeOutline). Do this by drawing a horizontal line in the middle of the face and drawing the eyes below that line. Please open your eyes so you can put another eye in between them.

Draw eyes slightly smaller than normal anime eyes but larger than real eyes. Make irises circular (anime irises and readers are often straightforward).

You can leave small eye details like student and eyebrows later after ensuring all other facial features are properly aligned.

Step 3 – Drawing a Realistic Nose

Although traditional anime spaces are usually just dotted (in preview) to get a style that looks realistic, you can draw a very close nose with real shape and proportions.

Stop the nose the way you would in a traditional anime character with the bottom of the nose between the chin and the center horizontal face. (and similar to other courses here on EasyAnimeDrawings).

Every realistic nose design can be divided into different curves. Draw two small curves in the nose, the other two curves to give the sides of the nose. Advertise the tip of the nose with one small curve and finally show the nose bridge with one long curved line. Be sure to draw only the last line on one side of the nose. Your drawing will look weird if you add both sides.

Step 4 – Drawing Ears

Draw ears as well as you would with many other anime styles. Draw the top of the ears to align with the top of the eyes and the bottom of the ears to align with the bottom of the nose.

Please note that the ears in this tutorial will eventually be completely covered with hair and wiped with the last steps, so painting yourself is an option.

Step 5 – Drawing Mouth and Lips

Anime lips are usually pulled out of the lips, but you can add them if you want a mouth that looks real.

Keep the mouth and lower lip in the middle of the lower part of the nose and under the chin.

Draw the mouth like a comma in the middle where the lines bend slightly downwards. You can also draw it wider than other mouths of traditional anime.

Step 6 – Drawing Simple Anime Hairstyles

Anime hair is usually styled into straight pieces. To get hair that looks real, you can still look at it as a clump of clumps but without straight ends. Instead, leave the clump “open” end and draw certain lines in these spaces to give the appearance of hair strands. This will create hair that is easy to draw but looks realistic.

To better understand how to draw hair, it can be very helpful to think that it is divided into parts of the tree (as shown in the example above):

Red – Front Hair
Green – Side Hair
Blue – Back / Top Hair

Keeping the above in mind, start with a real hair drawing by defining its overall shape and adding open ends clumps as described above. Do not add small sections yet.

Once you have finished painting the big hairstyles, you can go ahead and add a little split between the big clumps to give a little detail.

You should have a drawing like the one above when you are done.

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Step 7 – Cleaning the Drawing

In this short step, you can erase the parts of the head and face covered with hair. You should have a clean line with all the facial features in place when you are done.

Step 8 – Drawing Small Eye Details

After you have a basic line drawing of the face, you can add small eye details.

Although the eyes of the subject are slightly different from those in the model, the same drawing steps are still applicable. Just adjust them to make them look more like those in the example above.

It was also suggested at the beginning of this study to make simple lines of its first steps. Once you reach this point, you can bypass your drawing with black lines.

Step 9 – Finishing the Drawing By Applying Shading

To complete the drawing, you can add very basic shading.

Normal shading without a single clear shade of light source areas may be shady. These photos will usually be:

It is applied to the hair on the forehead
With eyelids
Under the nose
Above neck area (thrown head)
Inside / Back of hair

Make sure you leave room for the highlights of white hair and a small area prominent for the lips.

Conclusion

It would be a little tricky to find the right balance between anime and reality when trying to draw an anime character that looks real. Although this tutorial provides guidelines, there is no set way to draw these characters. You can test yourself by adding realistic or styled facial features and see what kind of effects you come up with.

How to Draw a Realistic Anime Face Step by Step