Drawing Radiant 2D Male Character Illustrations by Gugong

Want to finally draw your favorite guy and have him actually look like him? This class walks you through Gugong’s full fanart workflow for stylized male characters, from goofy deformation tests to a finished color piece you would post without cringing.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• Anime-style deformation techniques to capture a character likeness in your own style
• Drawing heads, facial features, and hair from any angle with natural proportions
• Designing poses that don’t look stiff using structure, tracing, and Clip Studio 3D models
• Drawing six core emotions plus complex mixed expressions with gaze and facial muscles
• Composition and layout tricks for eye-catching social media illustrations
• Lighting theory for mood, weather, and environment in color illustrations
• Planning fanart with storytelling, reference gathering, and rough color tests
• Finishing both black-and-white and full-color fanart step-by-step

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Basic drawing ability, no professional experience needed, suitable for beginners struggling with faces and coloring
• Tools: Clip Studio Paint PRO Ver. 3.0, drawing tablet
• Hardware: PC or tablet capable of running Clip Studio Paint smoothly

📝 Description

Preview: Gugong teaches fanart-first illustration for stylized male characters — you pick the character you love, break down what makes his face his, then rebuild him with your own taste. Expect lots of hands-on reps with head structure, features, hair, poses, and expressions before you touch a final piece.

This isn’t theory for theory’s sake. You start with anime-style deformation using dumb-simple stuff like objects and animals, so the idea clicks fast. Then you apply that same thinking to real faces: how far to push eyes, nose, mouth, and head shape without losing likeness. You will analyze your bias character’s proportions, test different deformation levels, and lock in a version that feels right to you.

From there it’s all practical fixes for the stuff that makes drawings look off. Why heads look flat from the side, why eyes float, why mouths break the face when they open, why poses feel like mannequins. Gugong shows common mistakes side-by-side and gives you tracing sheets, facial proportions guides, and pose examples to drill until it feels natural. There’s also a solid chunk on using Clip Studio Paint 3D models and materials — what they are good for, where they lie to you, and how to check them.

Then you get to the fun part that actually sells fanart: life. You will work through gaze direction, facial muscles, mouth shapes, and how joy, sadness, anger, and surprise really read on an anime face. After basics, you push into mixed feelings — laughing while crying, angry but blank — the kind of nuance that makes fans stop scrolling.

Color gets the same no-nonsense treatment. What light does, how shadows shift with direction, how environment changes color, and how to set lighting and mood for bright, dark, or emotional scenes. You plan first — story, appeal points, layout, rough colors — then execute two full finals: a comic-style black-and-white piece and a full-color illustration. If color scares you, that black-and-white pass is your safety net.

You also get 13 practice files and 11 long-term reference files for eyes, nose, mouth, ears, hair, expressions, lighting setups, and idea brainstorming, plus step-by-step illustration files so you can see every layer of the process.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• Beginners who love fanart but get stuck on awkward faces, stiff poses, flat composition, or muddy coloring
• Fans and aspiring illustrators who want to draw handsome, expressive male characters in their own anime style and post them with confidence

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

Gugong is a freelance illustrator and Raum Academy instructor known for sharp, expressive fanart shared widely on social media. Her client work includes cover illustrations and character art for Ensemble Stars!, Blit novels, Peppermint, JC Media, plus collaborations with Coloso, Huion, and Abler.

She teaches the way she works: analyze the character, solve the beginner bottleneck, keep it fun. Students stick around for her clear breakdowns of deformation and likeness — how to keep personality while drawing in your own style.

🏁 Final Result

• Two finished portfolio-ready fanart pieces of your favorite male character — one polished black-and-white comic-style illustration and one full-color illustration with planned lighting, composition, and storytelling — plus a reusable practice journal and correction system for self-study.

📢 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.