Chibi Crafting 101

Hello lovely 'D folks and welcome to Chibi Crafting 101! Today we'll be learning how to make some adorable chibis.

I use GIMP for all my dolling and for this tutorial, however you should be able to follow these steps on any program that has layers, a paintbrush, blur and/or smudge tool and recoloring options (desaturate, adjust hue, etc). You can probably follow this even on MSPaint, just some of the steps might not be applicable.

Step 0: It's okay not to be perfect
Remember your first signature set? Your first RP post? Application? Skin? It probably wasn't perfect. You've probably improved a lot since then. Same goes for dolling and chibi making. You won't be perfect all the time and you won't be perfect the first time. You learn by doing, so the important thing is to keep at it and don't be afraid to make a mistake : )

Step 1: What are you making?
Before you do anything else, load any program, make any brush strokes, heck even start up your computer, know what you're making. It'll help in the long run. If you have a picture reference, awesome. General idea in your head is awesome, too. But have a basic idea of what you're making. For this tutorial, I think I'm going to make a chibi version of a this character I dolled a few years ago. Feel free to make her or anyone else you have in mind, human or non-human. Now let's get crackin'


Step 2: Get your base
For this tutorial, I have provided the base, a very cute plushie-style chibi by Julie's Dolls. At the end I'll give you some tips on doing your own basehunting, but for now, let's work with this little cutie, shall we?

Now quite a few bases out there have a variety of not only poses, but also skin colors and sometimes even heads/faces. Go ahead and grab those, too, just in case.

Awesome. You'll want your canvas to be large enough for you to play around. 100x100 should be more than enough room, but feel free to make whatever size you're most comfortable with. You can always crop it down when you're done.

Step 3: Grab some color palettes
The next imporant thing any chibi maker needs is some color palettes. Now you might already have your own or be one of those awesomesauce peeps that can just go into their color selector dialog of whatever program they use and pick the perfect colors for whatever they need. If you're one of those people, color me impressed. If not, grab some palettes. I've gone ahead and included one of my favorite palette sets and you can also check out Watermelon Bubblegum's palettes for another awesome set. For any palette, you need a bare minimum of 3 shades (shadow, midtone, highlight). I usually work off of palettes ranging anywhere from 4-9 shades. Sometimes I don't use them all, especially on smaller bases like the ones we're using today, but at 4-9 gives a nice range and helps make the shading more realistic.

Step 4: Adjust base colors
Okay, so I'm starting with this little guy. If you're happy with whatever skin tone your base has go ahead and skip this step. If you're base needs a slightly different skintone than the ones provided, or has a an unnatural skintone (green, blue, undead white, purple with polka dots, etc), keep reading. My character has a darker skin tone than this, though not as dark as the darkest skin tone. There's a really quick and easy way to tweak this. Grab the darker skin tone with the same pose and place it over your base.

You'll notice there's a slight difference in the outline. That's because the darker skin tone is from an older version of the base so it's not a 100% match. That's okay, Go ahead and delete the excess from the lighter base until you're back to a 1 pixel thin outline. Now adjust the opacity of the dark base until you have the skin tone you want. I found my happy place at 77.2% opacity. If you're making an undead/vampire/impossibly pale person, grab your base and desaturate. You could leave it like that, but I find they look a little realistic if you do that same opacticy trick we just used to dark the skin tone, in this case 60.4%

For non-human skin colors, like, say, blue, there's another easy trick. Go back to your starting base and then go to the "Hue-Saturation" dialog (For GIMP users it's under Colors -> Hue-Saturation). I usually start with Hue and work my way down the dialog until I find something I like.

I settled on this nice shade of blue , which makes me think of Avatar, so I guess I'll be making one of those cool cats as well.

You can use this same technique for freckles, scars, tattoos and (in the case of my Neytiri here), markings. For freckles, grab your darkest color (the one used on the outline) and scatter them around the nose and cheek area. Adjust opacity as needed. Do the same with tattoos with whatever colors needed. For scars, like on this lovely lady, take the darkest color and outline the scars. Then grab the lightest color and place it along your outline to highlight. Because the scars had a slight reddish hue, I went back to Hue-Saturation until I got what I wanted. For markings, you can do the same thing you did for freckles, but I prefer to create a duplicate base, adjust the hue/lightness and then erase as necessary, that way you still have the shading of the skin.


Okay, now for the eyes. My vampire shirt girl has black eyes, but scar face and Neytiri don't. We're just gonna leave them. The black button eyes don't color very well on this base. You're welcome to attempt it using the techniques we talked about, but I'm going to move onto the next step, which involves getting Neytiri some ears and a tail.


Step 5: Base editing
It's okay not to be human. Be you Avatar, zombie, neko or mermaid, you can still have a Chibi. If you are making a full human, go ahead and skip this step.

We'll start with Neytiri. Make a new layer, then take the darkest color (again, the outline), use a 1 pixel pencil and draw out the ears. This is where references come in handy. You'll want the outline to be one pixel thick then grab a midtone color and fill it in. Tip: when doing your outline, it's okay if your first outline is thicker and a little rough. You can always take a 1 pixel eraser and clean it up. I sometimes fine it easer to do a sweep of my pencil/mouse and clean up after than adding stuff in one pixel at a time.


Do the same for any other types of ears (cats, bunnies, etc), tails, etc. Because Neytiri's tail has hair at the end of it and we're not there yet, I'm going to leave it hairless for now. It's a bit thin, so you might not be able to have a midtone and a full outline, but that's okay. Grab a darker color from the markings and add them to the tail.


Now for the mermaids and the zombies. For the mermaid, go into your palettes and pick out what color your tail is going to me. Select the darkest color, create a new layer and start sketching out the outline of your tail. Don't worry about being able to see the feet right now. Get your tail to a shape you're happy with, then erase what part of the base you don't need and fill in the outline with the middle shade of your palette.

For the zombie, you get to have fun with the earser tool. Again, make sure you're using a hard-edged eraser and start hacking off limps and parts of the chibi. I choose to cut off half of an arm and and part of the head. Then, using the top cream palette , I added in some stuffing, instead of brains, 'cause it's a cute little doll.


Step 6: Shoes and Shading
Onto the actual clothes part-- yay! We're starting off with the shoes because they're easy to draw and shade. Even if you're not planing on adding shoes (*cough Neytiri*cough*), keep reading, because this is the part where we go into shading basics. Though, gosh, if have a normal human with a skin tone already provided who doesn't wear shoes, you're probably getting antsy by now, huh?


Okay, we're grabbing our finished and edited base(s). I'm going back to vampire shirt girl, who wears brown boots. Now this base only shows the soles of the feet, which makes things nice and easy. I'm grabbing the very middle palette here for the shoes. First, create a new layer, then select the darkest color. Now outline the shoes, following the lines of the feet. Then fill in with the middle color.


Now duplicate the layer and move that copy under the main shoe layer (this will be important, I promise). Then use the magic wand tool to select the shoes. Tip: Keep whatever your coloring selected. It's kind of like a magic coloring book. No matter what your brush or pencil strokes are, you can't ever color outside the lines. Pretty cool, huh?

Select the darkest color in your palette, then using a fuzzy brush (I usually use 5-7 pixels), stroke along the bottom edges of the shoes, following the shadows of the base. Then pick the second color (5 pixels fuzzy) and paint along the dark brush stroke. Overlap is good. Then take the fourth color (you used the middle for the fill) and paint along the top. Your should have something like this: As you can see, it's not perfect. That's okay! Grab the smudge tool (7 pixels, fuzzy at 50 opacity) and make a few strokes around the shoes to smooth things out. Because smudging can create transparencies in your layer, this is why it's always a good idea to have a second fill layer behind everything you color.

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There. That's better. Now you can get as detailed as you want with shoes. For an open-toed-type look, grab a hard 1 pixel eraser and delete some of the shoe around where the toes would be.


Step 7: Pants
Gosh I hope you don't have a basic skintone no-extras human who's not wearing shoes or jeans. Otherwise, this is just getting awkward (If your character is going sans pants, you can skip this step).

Okay, so our lovely little base doesn't really show much of pants/shorts/skirts/etc, so this part is pretty easy. Same deal: outline, colorblock, shade and smudge. Because of the small size of the visable pants area, I was only able to use 3 colors, including the fill.

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Step 8: Shirt/Dress/Coat/Vest/stuff with folds
The process for making the dress is the exact same as making a shirt, just extend the bottom to the bottom of the chibi instead of the top of the pants (which you might not have, anyway). This is where visual references are going to come in really really handy, because now we have folds (cue dramatic music). Start as normal: 1 pixel outline with your darkest color, fill with your middle, make a copy.

Now, normally, I wouldn't make the outline follow the outline of the base body so closely, as clothes (usually) don't cling skin tight to people and even when they do, there are folds, bumps and lines. But because the base is a little squished and exaggerated, I'm not to fussed (and neither should you be).

This part is a little different. Start with a 1 pixel brush and your darkest color and outline your main folds, which are usually around the armpits, the chest and, for this base, around the bottom edge of the shirt, where the chibi is bending. Now go through all your palette colors and add to the folds, using a 1-3 pixel brush. Typically your darker shades are going to be on one side of the crease and your lighter shades on the other. Use your very last and lightest color sparingly and only on the very brightest areas of the shirt. I choose not to use it at all for right now.

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Okay, so the shirt isn't perfect. That's okay! We're going to grab our handy smudge tool and start blending the colors. (Tip: Make a copy of your unsmudged and shaded shirt to have as a "backup" copy, just in case) Now you want to be careful not to over smudge here, otherwise you'll loose all your folds. So go slow and small, fiddle with your settings and zoom in and out frequently, until you got something you're happy with. You might need to smudge, redraw or add in some additional lines or fold and smudge again. There's no perfect science, just keep fiddling until you like the result.


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If your character is wearing a vest, coat or some type of overgarment, use the same process, but do the overgarment first, before the main shirt. Why? Well one, a vest/coat/etc is going to affect where your shadows and folds are. And two, part of your shirt is just going to get covered up anyway, so why go through the hassle of shading it first?

Step 9: Hair
Headsup on hair (no pun intended)- this is probably the most difficult part of your doll, with folds being a close second. Brace yourself.

Start with your normal outline. It helps a lot if you have a point of origin for the hair and/or a part. Basically some point where you can say the hair starts from. Hair does not usually lie perfectly flat on the head, even when you're a greasy-haired potions professor. Add some volume and some stray strands and rough edges for added realism. Hair being a pain in the butt your outline might not look as clean as your others. That's okay. For the undersides of the hair, I filled in using a darker shade, as these areas are going to be darker, anyway.

Using a 1 pixel brush, start from your part/point of origin and draw a rough outline of the hair flow. Your result should give you some basic hair segments to fill in. As with the shirt, we're going to going to grab one shade at a time, moving from darkest to lightest and shade in the segments. You might not use all the shades, or want to go back a step and add some darker shades after your lighters ones. That's okay. Save the last highlight color for now. When you'd done, grab your darkest shade again and a dark fuzzy brush. Carefully using the edges of the brush, add some darker colors around your hair point or origin and the back edges of the hair.

Now it's smudge time. As before, be sure to take your time and don't over smudge, or your hair will look like one solid blob. And like before, you can always smudge a little, redraw some lines, add in some additional highlights and/or shadows and smudge again. Now remember that lightest shade on your palette? Grab it, get a nice big (relatively speaking) fuzzy brush (I used 7 pixels) and set your opacity to 30%. Do a large curved sweep across the hair to give it that shampoo commercial shine.

Now I'm pretty happy with the shading, but I feel like my girl's hair is too light. There's a couple ways I can tweak this and they all start by combining all your hair layers into one (I do recommend keeping a backup copy, just to be safe) I can do what we did for the zombie, where I desaturate the hair and then lower the opacity over the normal hair. I can go into Hue-Saturation and fiddle there. Or I can go into one of my all-time favorite tools, Levels (For GIMP users it's Colors -> Levels)

Levels works kind of like adjusting the brightness and contrast, except it allows you a lot more control and let's you adjust your overal hue, or just the red, blue or green levels.

Slide the input triangles to affect your shadows, midtones and highlights and move to the channels for that slight color tweaking. Like everything else, this is something that you're going to have to play with, but the results are fantastic. Here are my edited hairs in order of Desaturated overlay, Hue-Saturation, and Levels:

Now Neytiri is going to be a little more difficult. And by difficult I mean "Oh Good Lord, what have I gotten myself into?" But I got something I like by creating two pixel wide stripes of hair and, doing normal coloring and then adding in some dark and light horzonatal stripes for the braid texture.

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It being my first time doing something like this, it's not perfect, but that's okay. ; )


Step 10: Finishing touches
Almost done! Well I suppose you could stop now, but you know what they say about the devil being in the details. We're just going to add some nice finishing touches, both to our three dolls and show you real quick some tricks I did for some of the chibis I made for the holidays.

To finish you Ms. Scarface, I wanted to give her vest some pinstriping. I made a new layer and with a 1 pixel pencil, added lines along her vest, then lowered the opacity way down (10%) and topped it off with a button.

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For my vampire girl, I decided that the torso area was too small to have both neckscarf and the T-shirt design. So I opted for the T-shirt design, using the exact same thing I just did for the pinstriping.


For Neytiri, I colored her weird shoulder puoch thing like I did shoes, then added a 1 pixel necklace. I think drew one pixel lines for the middle of the feathers, then used a fuzzy one pixel brush to ass the feather details, without selecting the borders to five it a floaty feel. I topped it off with some beads on the edges of the braids. Also tail hair, because I somehow forgot that. Whoops.

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For zombies, vampires and axe-murders, you might need a little blood. Grab a red palette and select the middle color. Take a 1-3 pixel brush (you might want to slightly lower the opacity) and spread it around the area. Then take your darkest color and shade (as well as a highlight if you're going for a "fresh" look). For tattered clothes, just take a hard brush 1-3 pixels and start erasing bits of clothes.

For makeup, use a fuzzy brush and to draw right on your base and fiddle with the opacity

For making hair with different colored highlights, start by shading hair normally, then duplicate the finished product. Using whatever method you prefer, change the color of your copy, then using a fuzzy eraser, erase what isn't needed.

For glasses, start with a blue-white, then lower the opacity

For a scaley look (such as your mermaids and snake-haired Gorgans), start by shading normally, then create a checkerboard layer for your scales (you can shade this layer or leave it all the same). Play with the opacity and shade as needed.

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Above all, don't be afraid to fiddle and experiment! There's no better teacher than practice.


Step 11: The next step
Now that you have a completely fabulous chibi, it's time to show it off! Just be sure you always credit your basemaker, either by name and/or linking to their site. It's very common for credit to be part of a basemakers terms of use. Besides, dollers are notoriously nosey. They might want to grab that base for themselves or see what other bases a doller has to offer. As a lot of doll sites are linked to each other you can literally spend hours going from one to another and seeing what bases each has to offer. Some other great resources for bases are Deviantart and PixiStar

Hope this tutorial was helpful. If you still have questions, feel free to ask. Now let me see those chibis! :D

These are awesome, guys!

EmilyFaye, I ADORE the shades. That and the poses add a lot of personality!
Magz, not gonna lie. His eyes kinda scare me XD But I totally love that hat :D

DesR, you did just fine. She looks good and you went for more details and more complexity, which is awesome. <3 The only thing I would recomend is that when you do outlines for your layers, select that area (I usually use the magic wand tool, click the transparency, which selects everything BUT your stuff, then invert the selection)

When your outline and fill is selected, you can't actually color outside the lines so you keep those nice and crisp edges. But again, for your first chibi, you rocked it. Thumbs up!

Attempt it anyway :D You might just surprise yourself.

Easy-Peasy! : )

1. When you click on the paintbrush or the pencil, you should see this menu appear on your main toolbar:

The circled button shows a preview of what brush you currently have selected, next to the name. The (##) that appears after the brush name is the brush size, in this case, 5 pixels. You can adjust the size in a couiple of ways. You can go in and just change the number to "01" (might not work for every brush if there's not a 1 px equivalent, but it will for the circle). You can also use the scale bar to scale any brush up or down. Or, you can just click on the brush button. You'll get this:

The smallest brush (which is selected), is the 1 pixel brush. A one pixel circle is simply a one pixel block.. You won't ever have a brush that gets smaller than it. For outlines, I usually select this on pencil so I can get that nice hard edge. For shading, I usually pick a paintbrush because it's softer and blends better. (Just FYI, the smallest fuzzy circle brush on this menu is 3 pixels)


2. For filling (which yes, is the bucket tool) , you want to make sure that you have a complete outline all the way around the area. So for example on this jacket:

I can go ahead and click the bucket inside the lapel, because the area has been completely blocked off.

However, the left side of his jacket has not been completely blocked off (it just looks like it is, because the base is in the way. If I click on the left side right now, this happens:

Fix is easy. Take your middle color and a 1 pixel pencil and finish the outline, like so:

Then you should be able to fill as normal.

If you're ever not sure where the fill is "bleeding out", hide your base and any other layers touching what you're working on, so you can see if your outline is complete or not.

Hope this helped!

Oh those are adorable! I love the pleats on your girl's skirt and the texture of the boy's hair (boy hair is haaaaaaaaard XD) Well done! <3