How to Draw Manga Furries: The Complete Guide to Anthropomorphic Fantasy Characters (750 illustrations)

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Humans are the only truly bipedal mammals (walking on two legs as a normal way of locomotion). Therefore, simply making an animal stand on two legs makes it automatically look human-like. Hypothetically, this used to help us in group hunting (silent "pointing" with eyes), but today it's mostly used to send non-verbal messages. Rolling your eyes, looking away, looking around when thinking—if you want your character to be able to communicate this way, make sure the whites of the eyes are visible. Experiment with the size of the eyes as well; bigger eyes are usually more expressive.

Every animal has its own body proportions. Anthros combine the proportions of humans and animals, but they're still not random. Proportions come mostly from the skeleton: the length of bones and the joints between them. You don't need to know fixed values ("like 13 cm"), just relative ones ("the forearm is slightly shorter than the arm"). Among anthropomorphic characters, animals are the most popular. Humans are animals, after all, so we are all pretty similar, especially among mammals. It almost comes naturally to us to assign human characteristics to animals, for example to call a dog mean for destroying our shoes, or to feel sorry for a male bird rejected by a female. Making the animal stand on its hind legs and do typically human things doesn't seem too far-fetched to us because of this. Art by Ilya Royz I mentioned earlier that anthro characters are easier to draw than realistic humans, but easier doesn't mean easy. You still need to know something about drawing humans, because anthro animals are human-like animals. So let's see what you need to know to draw good anthro characters. Anatomy Is the Key For furries that live on land, it’s possible to imagine them living cultured, contemporary lives. If Just like in manga, anthropomorphic characters can be much more interesting and visually appealing than real humans. Their exaggerated facial features allow artists to communicate their emotions freely, and there's no pressure to reach full realism, since anthros are not real by definition. Because of this, they can be an excellent topic to draw!

But furries are also part animals, and they can have additional means of conveying emotions. For example, most mammals show their mood by moving their ears, and a reptile can use its tongue for something more than tasting the air. Experiment with it to see how you can make these additional motions a part of understandable facial expressions.

Hitsujirobo specializes in character design, illustrations and manga featuring animals and furries. Finally, when your character has a full, roughly sketched body, you can start adding details to it. Does it have hands or paws? What do its feet look like? What does it wear, what clothes, what jewelry? This is the most fun part about designing a character, but there still should be nothing random about it. Even the details should be functional! Yagiyama is a freelance illustrator who designs and draws characters--mostly men and monsters--for play-by-web and social games. You can also simply attach an animal head to a human body. However, you lose many opportunities for an interesting design this way, because while it technically can be called an anthro, it doesn't look plausible, which kills the immersion (the "sewn" parts drag your attention away from the personality of the character). Is it a rabbit? Is it a woman? Your brain has a hard time interpreting such a hybrid as one creature.This curious trait of the human mind has allowed us to create stories with non-human characters, to make them more interesting and to make their meaning clearer, especially for children. Non-human characters make the story obviously untrue, so that it can't be confused with real events, but it just makes the deeper truth hidden in them stand out more. Original depiction of a fictional anthropomorphic rabbit from the first chapter of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Characters based on cats, dogs, wolves, foxes, goats, birds, whales, sharks, crocodiles, dragons—and more! This means you need to simplify the face to make room for more human-like features. The eyebrows are a must, and they have to be mobile—we can read a lot from them. Many animals seem to carry a single facial expression all the time because of fixed facial features that we recognize as eyebrows (for example, many birds of prey look angry or proud, regardless of what they feel). They don't need to have the shape of human eyebrows, but they should be capable of affecting the shape of the eye. Many mammals have a tuft of whiskers above the eye—you can transform this part into pseudo-eyebrows. ance. Let’s convert the joints for walking upright so that the body doesn't lose proportion or balance. We are born with a tendency to assign human attributes to non-human entities. Before the dawn of modern civilization, people used to see a soul in stones, trees, and animals, and treated natural phenomena as powerful entities with their own will. Even random occurrences were assigned to the will of "fate", which sometimes "smiled upon" a person or was "cruel" to them.