How to Draw Conan from Detective Conan

Step 1

Step 01: All of the blue lines you see in this tutorial are only construction lines and we’ll be erasing them later on. So, it’s important not to press too hard on your pencil when drawing these lines. You’ll see our final lines in black towards the end of the tutorial.

We’ll start by drawing a large circle in the middle of our paper. Pro Tip: As it can be quite difficult to draw a perfect circle I recommend going around with your pencil a few times very lightly to get an outline of a circle and then draw your actual circle on top of that. It always helps to have a guide ^_^.

Next, we’ll draw our center and eye lines. Due to the way we have Conan posed, turning slightly and with his head titled, we need to adjust our lines to reflect this. Draw your vertical center line starting left of center and titled to the right, the bottom of the center line will still be to the left of the center of the head circle. It extends down below the head circle. Then, we’ll draw our horizontal eye line that starts on the left about a fifth of the way up the head circle and is titled upwards so that on the right it touches the head circle about a quarter of the way up. Lastly, on the center line below the head circle we’ll mark a notch in the center line for where the chin should be. The distance from the bottom of the head circle to the notch is about the same as the distance between the bottom of the head circle and the eye line.

Step 2

Step 02: Let’s begin this step by drawing the jaw line. On the left, we’ll start just above the eye line and we’ll draw a curving line down to the notch on the center line, then back up to touch the head circle on the right also just above the eye line. As you can see in the image above, the jaw line on the right is flatter and smoother than on the left, which has a more of an angle to it. Now, we’re going to be adding two more horizontal lines that are parallel to the eye line (so they should be titled at the same angle). These will be for Conan’s glasses, so we’ll call them the upper and lower glasses line to separate them from the eye line. So, we’ll draw the lower glasses line, again parallel to the eye line, just below the eye line and cutting through the jaw line. The upper glasses line starts on the left just below the half way point on the head circle and ends up on the left a little above the half way point. Got it? Great, now we can work on some features.

Step 3

Step 03: Conan has got some huge glasses, and in general his features are huge for his body size. That’s how it definitely should look ^_^. We’ll start here by drawing the outline of the glasses. Using our two glasses lines as guides, let’s start with the lens on the left. Draw a large “U” shape for the lens using the upper glasses line as the top of the glasses, the lens should extend out of the head circle to the left slightly. On the right, we’ll draw the same large “U” shape, but for the lens on the right we’ll add the top line to the glasses, which is just above the upper glasses line on the left. Now that we’ve got the lenses in place, let’s draw the large cup handle shape for the ear on the right. The ear should overlap the head circle at the top but will just touch the jaw line at the bottom. And, lastly, we’ll draw the irregularly shaped mouth. It should look something like the talking bubble in western cartoons or if some kind of leaf like shape with a point in the upper left corner and generally round the rest of way. It should be placed below the lower glasses line.

Step 4

Step 04: In the end, Conan’s face will look like he’s saying, “hey, something’s not right here,” so that’s why the mouth is open and the eyebrow on the left is bent down in a “hmmmmmmmmmmmmm” kind of way. A general point about the eyes. If you look at them carefully in the image above you’ll see that the eye on the right is fuller and we see a smooth lower lid but on the left the eye is thinner, more elliptical, and the lower lid line has more of a curve. This is a perfect example of our squashing 3D principle, where things that are farther away will appear more “squished” than those things closer to us. Let’s start with the eye on the left.

It might be easiest to start by drawing the upper lid which is a kind of smooth “s” line that starts above the glasses on the left and then curves down. Next, we’ll draw the squished “U” shape for the eye with the tops turning inward slightly as they touch the upper lid. And then, we can add the “(” line for the lower lid that sits just on the eye line below the eye. Great job. Moving on to the eye on the right, we’ll start by drawing the upper lid which is a simple “(” line that touches the right side of the lens of the glasses. Then, we’ll draw the half circle for the eye using the upper lid as the top of our eye. And lastly, add the smaller “(” line for the lower lid sitting just on the eye line. If you’ve done everything correctly, the eye on the right will appear a little larger than the eye on the left.

We’ll move on to draw the inner ear next which is made up of 3 lines. First, draw the long backwards “s” line that touches the bottom of the hear on the jaw line. Then, draw the two curving lines, one touching the top of the “s” and extending a bit, the lower curved line touches the “s” line just above the eye line. Before we jump to step 05, add the short line in the upper left corner of Conan’s mouth. This will be for the area that we will fill in towards the end of today’s tutorial .

Step 5

Step 05: Ok, mangakas. Now things are going to get a little bit tough. In the requests some people talked about how hard Conan’s hair is. And, it is tricky as it is made up of lots of irregular shapes. I’ll point out the major shapes and you should do your best to copy the image above. We’ll begin on the left and we’ll draw the thin “(” line for the ear on the left that starts on lens line and stops on the jaw just below the lower glasses line. Then we can draw the bang line across Conan’s forehead, this will help us to locate the hair spikes in future steps. The line starts on the left above the upper glasses line, starts by going up, then slopes back down slightly, and at the edge of the glasses on the right it curves back down to touch the ear on the right.

After you’ve got the bang line done, we’ll draw the irregular hair shapes around the head starting on the left. Here, just above the bang line we’ll draw the large hair shape, followed right next to it by a hair spike that curves to the left. There is then a line that runs almost parallel to the head circle and adds a little thickness to the top of the hair. Moving to the right side of the head, let’s start by drawing the halo line that outlines the head circle and touches the top of the ear. Then, draw the squarish hair shape on the top right and next to it a hair spike straight out about the some length. To finish up this step, there’s a last triangular hair spike to draw just below the ear on the right. Wow! We’re getting lots of practice and there’s even more.

Step 6

Step 06: We’ll take a break from the hair for a couple of steps and zoom in on the face to work on the glasses and eyes. To begin, let’s draw the irises inside the eyes using a “u” like shape. Both irises will be in the left side of the eye and the iris on the left will be a little thinner (3D squashing principle) than on the right. Next, we need to work on the rims of Conan’s glasses. We already have the outer line of the glasses drawn, so we need to draw almost the same shape just inside the lenses we already have drawn. As you can see in the image above, we don’t need to draw the bottom of the rims, they are rimless and we’ll just use the line we drew back in Step 03. When you’ve for the rims finished, we need to add a “[” and “]” shape to either side of the outer lens line, these are for the arms of the glasses. The bracket will overlap the ear on the left but not the ear on the right. Between the lenses we’ll draw the thin sideways “u” shape which overlaps the rim on the left. Lastly, polish off this step by adding the tear drop shape for the nose in the bottom right corner of the lens on the left. The bottom of the nose will rest just on the lower glasses line.

Step 7

Step 07: Conan’s glasses split and reflect lots of light, so we’ve got to add some reflection spots to the eyes and thicken up the eyebrows in this step. Let’s begin inside the eyes where between the iris and the bottom of the eye we’ll draw two lines slightly curving. Next, we should draw the four diagonal lines in the right part of the eye. The top two lines will touch the iris, while the bottom two will touch the larger curving line we’ve just drawn. Ok, super, let’s shift up and do the eyebrows. We already have an outline for the lower line of the eyebrows (it’s the same line as the top of the eye). But we need to add some thickness here, so that we can fill in the eyebrows later on. So on the left, we’ll follow the same “s” like shape but leave a little room between the lines. There’s a small dash next to the eyebrow on the left and a small spike just to the left of the eye. On the right we should draw the checkmark line on the top right and then make the left part of the eyebrow thicker. Before finishing up this step, let’s draw the inner ear in the ear on the left using three lines. When you’ve got it, we’ll move on to step 08 and lots more hair!

Step 8

Step 08: Time to work on the bangs and add some hair spikes! Again, as I said above do your best to imitate what you see in the image above as it’s not really possible to describe each hair spike. I will point out some key points for you though. Firstly, instead of having a square line shape of hair on the left side of the head, we’ll add the two inverted spikes. Then, between that shape and the head be sure to add a couple of spikes. Next, we’ll add spikes across the bang line overlapping the glasses and the eyebrows a little bit. Pro tip: you can see between where the bang line starts to dip down and the center line a large hair shape made up of four hair spikes. You might want to start the bangs by drawing this shape and then adding the smaller spikes to the left and right. A last important spot is the small area between the glasses on the right and the ear. You can see a “z” shaped line here which we’d like to add and the two little dash marks just above the ear on the bang line, but between this “z” line and the dashes near the ear we want to have a little spot that we’ll leave empty and white.

Step 9

Step 09: Well that does it for our construction lines. So we’ll get our our eraser and lighten our lines slightly. Using your finishing pen, we’ll trace out our final lines in this step and then we’ll do some filling. Start by tracing all of your final lines really thinly, we’ll come back to filling later. There are three spots we shouldn’t trace at all: the lower right corner of the rim of the glasses on the left, the left corner of the eyes and the bottom of the mouth. Leave them untraced. Once you have a nice thin outline of Conan, we’ll go back and work on filling. The hardest part are the eyes and we’ll start there, don’t start with the hair as it might make things tricky for you. Inside the eyes, we’ll leave the irises completely empty but we should fill in the areas between the lines we drew inside the eyes leaving three spots empty for reflection spots. Then we’ll fill in the eyebrows and thicken the line for the top part of the eye a little bit. Once you’ve got the inside of the eye and the eyebrows filled in, then we’ll fill in the rims of the glasses. Only after the glasses are done will we fill in the hair completely, including the small spike under the ear on the right. The last thing to fill in is the upper left corner of the mouth using our construction line there as a guide.

Step 10

Step 10: Wait a few minutes for your ink to completely dry and then take out your eraser to completely erase any remaining construction lines that you can see.

Step 11

Step 11: Now, to finish up we’ll take out our grey marker, or you can use your pencil if you don’t have a marker handy, and we’ll do a little shading. We’ll shade in in grey the inner ears on both sides, the nose, the rest of the inside of the mouth, and finally the spots inside the eyes we left white in the last step we’ll fill in in grey here leaving the large white circles empty. Give everything a minute to dry and take a look, you’ve just drawn the indubitable Conan from Detective Conan! Excellent work, everyone!

If your goal is to become a great mangaka make sure to draw Roy again from memory. Then compare the final drawing with the original and correct any mistakes you might have made. Try once again from memory. This is the best way to build a huge library of shapes that you can use in the future for your own manga characters. Draw with passion! -_^

Hiroshi