Key's Thread for Showing Off My Art Things

[Gors]

Jetters is right, even a deformed style such as chibi has actually very definite proportions. Shortening limbs arbitrarily does not mean shit, as exemplified here:



Consider thoe body sketches. A is the 'default' realistic proportion (kind of), and the rest are derivatives. B and C are popular-ish size for chibis (B is Nendoroid-esque and C is for all purpose anime doodle Keychain is roughly using). Both B and C scale down the body considerably but they have a logic behind them: the limbs will also scale down not only directly, but also exponantially.

For example D is the B's body and C's legs, and that is really unusual. Equally, F is just A with shorter limbs (as Kosheh said, but it really doesn't work). And G is A, but the body scaled down proportionally (not exponentially) to the size of C, which is also uneasy.

The whole point of chibi is to make it cute, and thus the proportion is reduced to infant sizes (a baby/yound child will have shorter limbs with small hands/feet, with stouter bodies and big eyes in comparision to their skulls. When we grow up, the skulls get bigger (thus making our eyes look smaller - our eyes never increase in size as we grow up), and our limbs also get longer, braking the 'cute' aspect babies have.

tl;dr it's not just smaller body, there are many things to consider when drawing chibi. I hope this was informative!