Exercise 0K: Drawing the Ear

This lesson comes from a reader’s question: How do you draw the ear?

Let’s start by looking at real ears. These are ears Ian drew at a barbeque. They belong to three of his friends. Ears are like fingerprints — Everyone’s ear looks different!

Next, let’s look at some basic parts of the ear. Every ear has these parts, so let’s see how they work together!

In yellow is the overall basic ear shape. It’s sort of like a bean!
In red is the HELIX. Like DNA! It spirals up and out of the center of the ear, and is a tubey like thing that forms the upper edge of the ear.
In blue is the ANTI-HELIX. It’s not evil or anything, it just spirals in the opposite direction. It starts from the earlobe, and goes up and tucks in under the helix.
In green is the ear hole, or CONCHA. The helix forms the upper edge of the concha. The anti-helix forms the lower edge of it. The dark green arrow points to the ANTERIOR NOTCH, which makes the concha into a little heart shape!

Let’s take another look at the barbeque ears. See how the basic parts are all there, but have variations?

In real life, everyone’s ear makes them unique. A different overall shape, and the wiggles in the helix and anti-helix give everyone’s ear a special personality. Sometimes the concha looks like a heart (like Nao’s!), and sometimes, a shark’s tooth (Huangy @o@!).

In manga, how ears are drawn shows the “style” of the artist. Each artist does it a little differently.

How Eiichiro Oda, of “One Piece”, does it:

How Kishimoto Masashi, of “Naruto”, does it:

Even from the front, the ear shows these basic shapes!

When you draw your ear, find out what works for you. You don’t have to draw every single shape and shade them in. Even if you draw hints of all the parts, the ear looks pretty good! See how Nao’s ear could be drawn here, with a simple S-shape.