Kawaii: How to Draw Really Cute Stuff

Angela Nguyen is a Seattle-based artist known for her cute illustration style. She is the author of the best-selling Kawaii series which includes How to Draw Cute Stuff, How to Draw Cute Animals, and How to Draw Cute Food. She has a presence online under the screen name Pikarar with 40k followers. Besides being an illustrator, she’s also a graphic designer trained in print, motion, packaging, and digital and currently designs voice experience for Amazon. For more of her work visit www.pikarar.com.

Kawaii is Japanese for cute, and this book shows you how to draw all kinds of people, animals and objects in a cute style.  Learn how to simplify your ideas and what makes something look this way and then get drawing with the simple, staged projects.It really is a lot simpler than I imagined drawing in this style; far more so than getting to grips with drawing manga characters.  You only need the basics of pens, pencils and paper and reading the introduction will show you how to depict cuteness.  Don’t worry, it is just a couple of pages and then it is on with the projects which are divided into people, creatures and things.  The people section starts with a look at topics such as proportions, expressions, garments and accessories so you already have a mix and match repertoire to enable you to tackle drawing a person.  After that the rest of the book has a page per project and shows it in various poses and moods, simplifying the drawing part by showing the subject first drawn as a series of shapes.  Projects show you the cartoon shorthand of showing things like various moods, motion, humor etc as you go along as well as how to ink in and add color.  Subjects include all kinds of people from police and chefs to cowboys, ninja and witches through a wide range of animals and finally cute buildings, transport, food items and plants.  I was surprised how easy it was to do and it is a great way of making original and personal greetings cards to give one example.  One for the keeper shelf.

• Angela's World 6Chapter 1: Getting Started 8Chapter 2: Cute People 16Chapter 3: Cute Creatures 48Chapter 4: Cute Things 98