Anime chibi – how to draw chibi.

Today we’re going to learn how to draw chibi. What’s a chibi you might ask? Oh my oh my… Well, it’s kind of hard to explain. A chibi is a short, funny and squishy caricature of what are usually regular anime/manga (or other) characters. Their a lot shorter and with bigger heads. For more details, check out Wiki.
But enough about this. We’re here to draw chibi not to discuss about it. Mainly, if you’re a pretty good anime drawer you should not have any problem with the chibi people. We can’t say there are any particular rules for drawing chibi, everyone does it as they want to. Below you can find a couple of examples.

But, if you are looking for a step by step guide, we have one in a picture (a little bit bellow). The main steps are the following:

1. Begin by drawing the shape of the face and head. Chibi are like kids, so the faces should be very round and should represent at least 1/3 of the entire body.
2. Then draw the eyes in the center of the face. They are very very large, being the most important part of a chibi character. Use pupils, irises and eyebrows to give your characters the facial expression you want to.
3. In most cases, chibi don’t have a nose, but if you still want to draw one, make it just a little dot above the mouth.
4. Add a very simple mouth Then focus on the hair, but still keep it pretty simple, but expressive
5. Then draw the body. Chibi bodies are chubby, very small compared to the head and so are the arms and legs too.
6. Add shadows and final lines. Color your chibi and.. that’s about it.

And of course, you can learn how to draw chibi from videos. We have a couple of them, quite interesting i might add, just bellow. Check them out.

How to draw chibi heads

Six ways of drawing chibi faces

And that’s it. You can now consider yourself a chibi drawing expert. Actually, no, but if you keep practicing all the things showed in this tutorial, you will once day know how to draw chibi. In the mean time, keep drawing and don’t forget to read our other manga/anime drawing guides.