How to Create Anthropomorphic Characters (Faces)

Now that Beastars has released and is actually doing well, the Beastie art scene is expanding. However, there is much an artist needs to grasp before venturing into the art of anthropomorphic animals. The most important thing is to really obsess over an animal, drawing it from all angles so often that if some dude on the street yelled "Yo my fellow meatsack, can you do a homie a solid and drew em an anteater on this tissue right here?" You're response can be, " Ew, it's used, but no worries, I can draw you you an anteater real quick, my fellow air breather." 

This is piece from 2014 when I was 21. I was trying to create an ibex character, and I'd draw a real ibex first, and then try to add facial features to humanize it. After a week, I'd forget how one looked and there I was, back on Google doing another 4 or 5 studies of ibex's till I remembered their form in my noggin once again. Now, 6 years later, Beelz the ibex has a little more spunk in him and his design is a little closer to perfect. 

The same goes for my main characters, Bass, Bili, Hamed, and Zatoichi. They used to look like straight up wild animals. It took a lot of time practicing not just animals, but human expressions that they felt more natural for me to draw. 

This is from 2014. Notice the blank eyes and odd face shape on Bili, Hamed, and Zatoichi. I still hadn't fully grasped the primates anatomy. 

2018, and the characters had grown immensely easier to draw. It's all repetition my friends. 

Next I want to talk about what to avoid. And that's lazy designing. When you create an anthropomorphic character, really try to incorporate features that drive home the design.  Here are examples of some weak anthropo character designs. 

This thing is from BNA. What animal is it? Hell should I know. A raccoon? A puppy? Really bad use of mascara?

Inuyasha was always referred to as a dog demon.  My dude is wearing cat ears. Ain't no dog if I've ever seen one.

Killing Bites is more of an 18+ furries only fan cosplay. The girls have near identical faces and hair, and if it weren't for some panels showing the actual animal in there with the characters, you'd have a hard time figuring out what animal they're supposed to represent.

This is me as a 14 year old ready to trick or treat like a mofo. If you're gonna use stripes, at least follow the patterns of an actual tiger. This dude's little sister went rampant with the sharpie while he was asleep.

And lastly, we have Beastars. I'd rate the designs pretty good overall. Legosi the wolf is great. Bill the tiger is not bad. They express personality very well. But then there's Haru. As you see in my tutorial, going too animalistic has drawbacks, mainly in herbivores. Her eyes have no sclera, which I get is trying to be more realistic, but all rabbits have a sclera (whites of the eyes), it's just that their iris are massive in comparison. My female rabbit has very enlarged iris's, and her eyes are closer to the sides of her face unlike Haru, yet I also add lashes and darken her bottom lips to attract your eyes, because all boys and girls like pretty things. The reason Haru's design is a problem is because while watching, my girlfriend and I loved everything about Beastars, except her. Her character was great, but the drawback was that all the other characters had more whites in their eyes. You could see their eyes looking away to think or avoid eye contact, but with her, there was none of that.

So, in conclusion, study your animals. Experiment over and over again. This walkthrough was more on creating faces, albeit I didn't go into creating distinguished faces within one species of animal. Distinguishing 2 fox characters can get tricky, but the process is similar to creating different human faces; using the snout, eyes, ears, and pretty much the rest of the body to differentiate the characters of the same species. Next time I'll walk you through anthropomorphizing the body so you don't have an animal head planted on an entirely human body.  See you then!