Frieren looking up
There’s a trend going around on social media right now where someone on Reddit posted an attempt at drawing anime character Frieren from a low-angle perspective and asking for advice on how to do it better. The whole art world, it seems, is tumbling over themselves trying to answer the call. A lot of folks are waking up to the fact they don’t know how to do it, either.
Because, frankly, it’s hard! You don’t see people from this angle often, and the bastardized Loomis method we’ve all kinda-sorta learned doesn’t really work for this kind of perspective.
I’ve done a few up-angled figure drawings and always liked the novelty of it, but what I haven’t done is figure out how to do it from imagination. When I took my first few stabs at the job, my sketches were awful: not really low angle, busted perspectives, badly distorted features. Even though I was working from Frieren reference images, my brain could not rotate them believably.
I found a human reference from my Aftyn collection and based this drawing on that. I winged my way through how to turn her into a recognizable anime character and the lighting, but I wound up with a thing that looks pretty good. My answer to the original question: “Get good reference!”
I’d like to call attention to a few of the other inspiring posts:
- Kal Athannassov made what I think is the best response, describing the process he went through and showing the intermediate steps along the way
- Karla Ortiz made a painted version that’s just stunning
- Evan Chan really captures that “anime” look
- bo bun drew a real cutie
- Marin Mohan painted a wistful, beautifully realized Frieren
Medium: Digital
App: Procreate
Tools: Pencil