From Shapes to Characters – Core Skills and Strategies for Anime Illustration by Nekojira

Nekojira breaks his whole workflow down to one idea: everything starts with shapes. In 29+ hours he shows you how to build appealing anime characters from simple forms, then push them with light, color, and controlled rendering.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• Use shape language and silhouette contrast to design readable characters
• Abstract complex bodies, faces, and hair with C, S, and I strokes
• Build dynamic proportions using boxes and rhythm
• Sculpt form with light and shadow, occlusion, and edge control
• Plan color thumbs with tonal value and saturation balance
• Render skin, hair, and cloth for a soft, finished anime illustration

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Basic drawing fundamentals, familiarity with anime-style faces and bodies
• Tools: Clip Studio Paint, drawing tablet with pressure sensitivity
• Hardware: PC or tablet capable of running Clip Studio Paint smoothly

📝 Description

This isn’t a “watch me draw” class. Nekojira actually stops and explains the why behind every choice. He starts with super simple stuff — what is a shape, what is a silhouette, what are negative shapes — and then shows you how to pull clean C, S, and I strokes out of messy real-world reference. You practice a lot: arms, legs, torsos, heads, folds, hair flow. The point is to stop getting lost in details and build a solid visual library first.

From there it gets practical. You’ll play with rhythm and contrast — curvy vs straight, narrow vs wide, simple vs complex — to make poses and hairstyles feel alive. He covers boxes for proportion, eyes and expressions by breaking them into segments, and how to keep line weight interesting without overworking it. If you’ve ever had a sketch you loved die during lineart, his method for converting sketches to clean lineart will hit home.

The second half is all about making it look good in color. Nekojira breaks down his painting steps, occlusion shadows, shadow shape design, tonal value, and edge control. Then color: how he picks from the color wheel, balances saturation, and uses dramatic vs ambient light to set mood. You get 18 hands-on exercises plus PSDs, 20+ custom brushes, and his layered working files, so you can poke around the layers and see exactly how the final white-themed character comes together.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• Beginner to intermediate illustrators who love soft anime style and want a clearer process
• Fanartists and original character artists stuck at sketch stage who want to finish polished pieces

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

Hello! I’m Nekojira, a freelance illustrator with about five years in the field and over 600K followers across socials. Before going freelance, I worked as a teaching assistant at Krenz’s Art Academy from 2019 to 2022, where I spent a ton of time breaking down tricky concepts for students.

I’ve done character design for Revived Witch, Azur Lane, and Hololive English, plus illustrations for Arknights and Hololive. My work is known for that soft, gentle feel mixed with solid anatomy and flowing silhouettes — and in this class I share the trial-and-error behind it, especially how I use white, light, and shape rhythm to get that mood.

🏁 Final Result

• A finished, portfolio-ready anime character illustration built from shapes to final render, with full PSD layers, color thumbs, and refined lighting to show your process.

📢 Guys, this is a Group Buy campaign, check the GBC forum thread to get access

You can find the course preview in the download section below.