This is a drawing tutorial which should teach you more about some of the finer points of drawing, it's an advanced tutorial.

Lets start with Superman's symbol, it's an example of a drawing style which is beneficial to us for illustration purposes of Style Reproduction which can be used to draw characters flawlessly in their original style; Many of you probably have no clue that Superman's famous S symbol is trademarked by line X/Y distance of the points, Angles of the curves and colors, but in fact it is trademarked clearly by such.

This short truth tells us that everything drawn with lines can be taken appart by line endpoint location, line width, line curvature, and shape fill color, reflection color, shadow color, gradient methods (striped lines versus blend in example), which if you can record these things, you can create these features flawlessly. At that point drawing becomes less of an art and more of a science, requiring angular scaling math for rotation in example allowing you to calculate how the lines should be or even create a program which can draw that character in any pose. this is art reproduction.

To begin, you must start with a good clear image of the character, at minimum for best results you'll need a straight front profile of the character, and a side profile. But many times such drawings are not public and all you have is an angled and posed picture of the character. at which point measurement can become hard, and sometimes impossible requiring some artistic inspiration to gloss over covered regions.

Next we'll briefly cover a summary of Style conversion. the same attributes of lines and shapes can be measured then converted to a different drawing style, so in example a cartoon where there really is alot of ambiguity in their features if they were real, because practically everyone has the same features in that drawing style, just maybe different Spacing, colors, and eyelashes. so you record what you can. then adapt it to the basis of another drawing style. this method is great for converting pixelated game characters to anime style characters, or cartoon characters to anime characters, however you'll find there are different anime styles, like yugioh versus bleach. so you'll have to pick a drawing style you want to convert to and take General Measurements of the curves that represent things. Scaling, color and type will be upto you, but you should apply the spacing and any unique colors, shading and characteristics you were able to record from the thing you're converting from, that insures the character is true to form in the next style.

some times you need more than line recordings, you'll have to consider the drawing style of the original for things like age so as to know what the body figure should look like, as in example with pixelated characters or cartoons the body shape of a teenage girl may all be the same stickfigure, where adults in the style show more curves, so this fact should not be carried over if the style you are converting into has curvature on teenage girls. At which point measurements need to be made to compare the character's features to others close to her age so as to get a basic "Scale" to apply to the teenage female form of the target style. Where things are not able to be measured, because they are covered or you don't have a clear picture of the curvature, Arrtistic liberty can be used, but you should study how personality is drawn in that medium to create the proposed looks and their colors.

leg length arm length and head size should also be compared to other characters to determine scale of such.

This is the basic summary of the science of Drawing style conversion and reproduction. this is the "DNA" of a character. and how you redraw them is based only on the target style you are drawing them in.

If you want to create a new character in a certain style, these are the tools to do so as well.

Some things to note, Ai at current thinks all anime have the same eyes just in different sizes and colors. but as we know there are different eye shapes, and each eyeshape is usually applied based upon the character's personality. not just eyes either, could be mouths, teeth, noses, eyebrows, eyelashes, chins, jaw and cheeks, ears, and of course hair. and that's just for the head. so it will take some studying before you are able to create your own character in a given style as you'll have to see how the creator of that style communicates personality with these things. Alternatively sometimes the original artist will make characters features to represent a personality, but the representation is not very clear and could be more clear if drawn another way. This is where you have artistic liberty to make such changes if and as you are able.


Main point: other peoples measurements may not be sufficient for your uses. they may be incomplete, they may lack an axis you need to measure on, there may be ambiguity or they may start from points you cannot reference because it may require complicated area calculations (in example "middle of the nose"), they might be arrayed in a fashion thats confusing to make sense of. for example rather than presenting you with an XYZ of the ends of the line and a vector describing the curve intensity, and an XYZ angle to go with it; they might just record it in a matrix. no one can really read nor understand matricies, they are the stupidest form of communicating numbers, meant for computers that are trained to read them.

What are the applications of this?

well some characters started off in games when graphics were not the best. the original team designed the characters, but now they're dead, and a new team gets ahold of the license here and there and each one gives the character a different face. because, "no one knows what they really look like because it was originally quite pixelated" examples of such are Samus Aran, and Chun Li.

Alternatively some characters really just do not have much art about them, they were never in a TV show or movie nor animation, there may just be a still image of them from a game, you may even just have 2 images of them from the whole game, or 1. so if you want to create more you'll have a lot of measurements to do. An example of this is Slutty McSlut.

Some characters much like with pixelated game characters, might be cartoons which were just never drawn in a style which is pleasing to the eyes. if you want to draw them as such, you'll need to convert them to a target style. An example of this would be Vicky from fairly odd parents, or Frankie from Foster's home for imaginary friends, or Jenny Wakeman from my life as a tennage robot, or the powerpuff girls etc.

"Can I convert something to multiple styles?"

Yes, you can Mix styles by deciding which characteristics you want from each style, and measuring not just curves but relations such as Spacing and proportions between them, then applying the shapes individually to create your perfected Mixed style to the form.. this means however each thing should have 1 style which it is referencing. like the hairs of eyelashes could be in an original cartoon style attached to an anime style eyelash outline of a specific eye shape style from a target anime, the iris can also have a specific shape and shading applied to it, as well as the pupil if it's even going to be used. shading of the sclera should be from 1 target style. you get the idea. that's how you mix styles.

Lastly there is something in art called accentuation. where you makes something of a different size for a specific purpose, but in doing size alone, some manner of the curves should be preserved, where this is merely a sorta scaling operation to increase or decrease the size. but also sometimes the shape is something you want to modify as well, as shapes can have meanings artistically too, such as saggy breasts versus perky ones. one's artistic intent is to make the character appear mature, the other is to make them youthful. many art skills can be applied for accentuation, even down to realistic rendering to convey skin pores, for example if you wish to mention something about their pores, it's helpful to show it.

these are the basic sciences of art for drawing style manipulation.

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