My Quest To Make A Living As A Comic Book Superhero Artist: How To Create Your Own Avatar Character Part 1

In this post I continue with my obsession with the movie “Avatar”. This time I going to show you how to create a Na 'vi, the alien beings from the movie. The Na 'vi are actually a mixture humans and cats so when creating a one you have to keep that in mind. By learning how to draw the Na 'vi you could come up with your own mixture of human and something else to use as one of your comic book characters maybe.

We will start with just drawing a Na 'vi head. The first thing you want to start with is the shape of the head. This shape will be something like an oval, but you can modify it as you see fit. Below are some shapes that can be used.

This next image shows the head shape I came up with. The one thing to keep in mind is that like cats there is a wider space between the Na 'vi's eyes so the head shape should allow for that.

Now you want to give the shape a little more detail so that it looks more like a head. Lets also add the neck and shoulders to this head. I will also put on the ears, which you will notice is a bit higher on the head than they would be on a human head. Also notice that they look more cat like as well.

Now lets start roughing in the facial features. The Na 'vi have big cat shaped eyes and as I mentioned before there is a bigger space between them than on humans. The nose starts wide at the bridge, but only gets a little thinner as it comes to the tip. Also the nose doesn't protrude like a human nose it is almost flat as it comes down to a cat like nose tip. The mouth is much more human like.

Okay, lets put on some hair and line in a little more detail like the eye balls and neck muscles.

Now that the features are all mapped out we can do some shading to make the drawing come alive. The Na 'vi also have stripe like designs on their face and bodies so when you are doing your shading don't forget to put them in. And there you have it, a nice little Na 'vi character that you created.

You can see a video of how I did this drawing by clicking this How to Draw Your Own Avatar Character link. Tomorrow I will do a whole Na 'vi, body so check back then.

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