Steps
1. Make sure you have a quiet work environment your favorite music or movie and lots of pencils erasers and lead.
2. Decide whether you want your character to be a boy or girl.
3. Decide what kind of personality your character will have. This will model his appearance and add a twist to their personality to make them more interesting.
4. Decide if you want them to have long hair or short hair, spiky or comfortable, wavy, curly, or straight, or maybe just plain unique!
5. Create a personal storyline to go with it. Or you could insert the character into a certain Manga you enjoy, that would then be a RPC (role-playing-character). When making your own story, be sure to be as imaginative as you want!
6. Draw them! Make unique hair and clothes, have them have lots of charms, bracelets, piercings, tattoos, or lots of weapons hanging out of their pockets. They should have a theme. The first character I made up was named Kika Yugami, she was Jungle Girl. Her theme was wild and sassy. She had lots of ties on her arms and legs, a tank top and short skirt, long boots, and enormous swords. Be creative! A good website for drawing anime tutorials is MangaUniversity.com
7. Get them some personal information. They should have a name, age, theme, position in anime, favorite color/person/book/music/anime, etc., hair color, crush/boyfriend/girlfriend, best friend, birthday, prissy/tomboy/punk/emo/Gothic/sporty status, and blood type. (The types and meanings are listed below.) All this information will pay off if you choose to make an anime series or something later.
8. Check out these blood types and meanings:
* O - Happy, open, caring, and energetic
* A - Chilled out, cool, caring, positive attitude
* B - Chilled out, cool, mean, negative attitude with an occasional glimpse of happiness
* AB - hyper! funny, positive thinking, energetic, cool, overall great person!
9. Choose their talents! They could be sporty, artistic, famous, wannabe, or whatever you want them to be. They could be a ballerina, like Mint Aizawa in Tokyo Mew Mew; they could be a rich, famous, over-all superstar like Zakuro Fujiwara, who's also from Tokyo Mew Mew, or they could be just plain weird like Spongebob Squarepants!
Tips
* When designing what your character looks like, don't go overboard with the special effects. You don't want 3 cool belts, 5 cute bracelets, and 8 weapons! Just go easy on it. Remember, when it comes to anime, a little can turn into a lot!
* Even if you don't think you can draw, you can! You probably just have a low self esteem. Practice on other anime or manga you see on shows if you aren't creative. People will still love your art even if it isn't original--it's called fanart. If you keep practicing you will get better and more creative. It doesn't matter if you're good or bad you just need to start. If people critique your art badly then just keep trying. They will like it a little more each time.
* If the character seems too bland, that's okay! Get some peer critique from peers or people of the same interest, or if you're creating a character for a published work, get feedback from your audience. Remember, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, but also is harsh criticism!
Warnings
* Draw your lines lightly or you wont be able to erase.
* Don't let people bother you when they don't like your art.
* Don't make their weapons huge! You don't want your character to be carrying around five feet wide swords all the time! Make it simple. Just make it big enough so they can defend themselves well.
* Manga won't make you friends. In fact, connecting to a fantasy world tends to drive us away from real social interaction. Many people will start running at the first sign of interest in trivial hobbies.
* Make sure your ideas are not plagiarizing another anime or manga.
