How to DRAW 90s Anime Aesthetic (HanavBara Style)

welcome it's me Aaron the artist today I'm going to be doing another style study where I break down an artist's style into all of its little Parts figure out how the style works and then I'm going to try to draw my own character in that style for this one I wanted to take a look at a kind of 90s anime aesthetic I've seen a lot of shows over the years with this very retro vibe to them they have this sort of stereotypically anime look things like you know Sailor Moon and things like that anime has moved on quite a bit since then in terms of style but I still think it's a really interesting style to learn from and to do it we're going to be looking at an artist who draws that 90s anime aesthetic still today and that's Hannah Barra as far as I can tell hanaf Bara is a team of two artists working together to draw modern characters and shows in that retro 90s style one of the coolest things I saw them do is this amazing gentian impact trailer in their own style we're going to be looking at hanafbara three sections anatomy in proportion color and rendering and special features one of the most standout things about the halafbara style comes in the anatomy and proportion you can see right away here that there's a ton of simplification and stylizing going on all over these characters but the most obvious places you see it are in their faces first look at the placement of the features on the face themselves if I were to draw a normal Loomis head you would expect the eyebrows to fall about two-thirds of the way up the face but on Hanover characters you can see that it's much closer to halfway up meaning that all of the facial features get sort of squished into the bottom half of the head leaving much more forehead space this is a fairly common Trope in anime but I still thought it was worth mentioning [Music] next notice how small most of the features are on the face the ears the nose and the lips are all much smaller than you would expect in real life but more than that hanafbara uses some very specific shapes that are unique to the style for noses they tend to do this sort of stretch triangle shape and then one of the most interesting Parts is that the mouths always have strong colorful lips in a lot of modern anime you typically won't see any indication of the lip color at all and sometimes you won't even see any lines showing where the lips would be third notice how the eyebrows are still visible over the top of the hair I figure that anavar does this because eyebrows are one of the key elements to showing how a character is feeling placing the eyebrows in different places and angles can completely change an expression if you want your characters to be expressive it can help too always have their eyebrows on show and I figure that's why we always see the eyebrows even over the top of the hair in this style lastly I want to take a minute to talk about what might be the most distinctive part of the 90s aesthetic that Hannah Barrow is going for and that's these very stereotypically anime eyes kind of eyes you see in this style are what most non-anime fans think of when they think of anime eyes the absolutely massive size of the eyes compared to the rest of the face and then this very flat look where everything has a sharp outline even the highlights inside the iris have an outline this together with how many highlights we have the size of the highlights and all of the eyelashes sticking out at the edges makes the eyes feel they feel a little bit like stickers instead of natural eyes now don't get me wrong I'm not trying to be negative about the style and saying that that's a bad thing I actually think it's a really important part of that 90s aesthetic to have those eyes there's definitely a reason why all those how to draw anime books are filled with eyes like these and that's because it really was a popular part of anime in the 90s outside of those elements there are a bunch of small proportion tweaks the ears are quite a bit lower than you would normally see them and characters tend to have very thin waists and pointy chins but these features are all much less noticeable than the others let's move on to the coloring and rendering [Music] in terms of colors Hanover doesn't shy away from some pretty bold palettes sometimes it has this very sort of pop art look with all of the bold colors together the main color in a large number of hanaf Bara illustrations is a vibrant pink you'll often see that in the background and also giving a pretty distinctive look to the skin tones of characters regardless of what colors are used though you almost always get purplish Shadows I suspect that anavira achieves the shadows in their work by using a multiply layer and then a purplish tone to add all of the Shadows to the entire illustration at once now what you tend to get in terms of the style of the shading is all fairly simplified there's just one Shadow tone all over applied using a cell shading technique you don't see any fancy soft Shadows you don't see any subtle shifts in value or anything like that there's one tone for the mid-tone and another tone for the shadows and that's it you quite often get a third tone for the highlights as well but they only appear in the hair clothes and skin don't tend to get any highlights at all it's just used to give the hair a kind of shiny finish notice something important now about hanaf barish cell shading as well they try their best to keep all of the Shadows connected together in a single shape one tendency a lot of people have when they first get into cell shading is just trying to put little blocks of shading all over the place in different places and you know what if you look at a photograph of a real person a lot of times shadows will fall into lots of little shapes all over the body but if you do that with cell shading it just looks messy cell shading isn't as easy as you might think because effective cell shading has really carefully designed Shadow shapes and that's just the sort of thing that you see with hanaf Bara all right the last thing there are a bunch of little flourishes that make the Hanover Style finished and Polished things that don't so much fit into the other categories but I still thought they were worth mentioning these two things are more like finishing touches to be applied over the top of the drawing hanapara puts quite a bit of effort into making their illustrations look like their screenshots from a 90s anime and two specific things make the look work first they overlay some noise over the top of the illustration and second they add chromatic aberration to add some interesting looking Hue shifts all over the place the two effects together combine to create the illusion of an anime shown on an old-fashioned 90s TV these two effects are real easy to do you don't want very much of either though because that can just make your image look messy in the case of noise and just weird in the case of chromatic aberration to get that real finished anime screenshot look Hanover will quite often put some text at the bottom of the image as if the anime is showing subtitles so that can be a nice Finishing Touch if that's your thing that covers just about everything I've got to say about the hanaf Bara style so let's recap what we've said while I try to draw my own character in The hanaf Bara Style see you in just a second okay so to get things started I decided to give myself a real challenge for this and draw an OC that looks quite different in design to a lot of the characters you normally see in the hanaf Bara Style and that character is my original character Alia Dawn you can see I've got to the left both some of the original sketches are made of Ali's design and a piece of Wednesday fanart from hanafbara Drew Wednesday with that super serious expression and I thought that would suit Ali perfectly you can see I've got a hand raised up in a kind of pistol shape that fits well with the rebellious kind of character that Ali is and I noticed that in a lot of Hannah para illustrations you see the hands doing some sort of emoting like this in terms of the colors Ali has bright blue hair and eyes I try to make it extra bright and saturated compared to usual to get some of that bold color palette from hanafbara the shadow colors of course have to be that strong purple issue especially in the skin and we want to try and group all of my Shadows into a single continuous shape wherever we can we're almost done with that character now I just have to make a few tweaks to perfect things getting the eyes slightly bigger adding a little highlight across the jacket stuff like that let's take a closer look at some of those special features though before we wrap up you can add both the distinctive noise and chromatic aberration I mentioned earlier in a very easy way if you use procreate first make a copy of your character on a new layer then go into adjustments chromatic aberration change the mode to displace and then drag your finger over the screen to apply this trippy effect you want the effect to be ever so slight just barely noticeable you can adjust the transparency to make it even more subtle if you need to to add the noise add a new layer and fill it with a light color set the blending mode to multiply go into adjustments then noise then drag across the screen until you get just barely visible levels of noise adjust the colors until you're happy let's add a simple abstract background behind and a few of those twinkly stars from the Wednesday image and we're done with this often hanif bara's backgrounds are quite intricate and will feature a whole bunch of different characters all interacting but we're just going to focus on a single character here today in any case if this helped you out do all of those things for me and have a nice day [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: AaranTheArtist

Views: 15,127

Keywords: How to draw, anime, drawing tutorial, art tutorial, art lesson, art, 90s, aesthetic, retro, Hanavbara, SailorMoon, artist, digital art, art tips

Id: iI0QIaSmUFg

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 10 2023